saturn.

[prediluvians-blog]

HEADCANON 003 --- ILLUSION

You’re on your knees and the fire has razed you but it will not raise you.

No, because you’ve always been too convinced of the weakness in your blood, of your runty, heart-sick mortality. It’s how birds will molt clipped primaries and regrow them stronger, but they’re standing on a perch looking out of an open cage, afraid to spread wings that won’t hold their weight. That might, that might, that will- but how can they know when all that eggshell-blue has had all the home torn out of it, when they’ve tried and failed, how can they know.

And it’s how you’ll find young elephants tied to thick spines of oak and snakewood, dragging at the stake until the day they learn to stop. Until they’re full grown and complaisant. And the lesson is: you will never be free, so do not try. See, here is a mighty creature reduced to the specification of exotic, standing passive with a rope around its neck, a rope leading nowhere, leading to a spindle in the dirt that could be torn with a trample of heaving earth and gravity-defining feet. So maybe, the real lesson is: an bird born in a cage does not know how to fly. But you could, you could, you could-

Maybe you do. In a world where the famine-stripped boy is still raised by a carnivorous mother, a parent who loves and abhors and cannibalizes her children; is still a straggly streak in Kova’s relentless winter, snapping for scraps with the dogs; is still hollowed bone and skin stretched to groaning-

The change is: when the fire comes calling, you take it into yourself.

The change is- they burn you, and you let them.

The fire torching out all that tattered mortality, scouring you down to naked truth.

So here, in the starless dark. Here is a boy become fire made flesh: blazing with light and blinding for it- so bright it hurts to look at, so bright they’ll fall to their knees, fall gibbering for the sight of you. Your skin thrums with the heat of a thousand suns, the steps in your chest lead to a furnace that cages stars. They torched you and here you are, burning. They torched you and there they are, burning for it. And you shudder, and you smile.

(And your smile, it’s all teeth, long and ivory and sharp. And maybe those are melted sea tears in your eyes, or maybe it’s just blood.)

But isn’t that something? A boy who lived breathed was reared by ice finds he has nothing but fire in his veins and a red sun dripping molten yolk through his ribs. All things have a way of growing in the dark, and sometimes if you need light to yearn towards, you’ll make your own.

And see: here is a boy more stardust than child, more hunger than human. Still famine-eaten, still ravenous and deprived but finding an appetite for hearts-

(And, see, isn’t that just the definition of divine?

Soaked in light but red-handed, red-mouthed. Dripping crimson in the embers of a burned village.)

But this is not that world.

This is the world where you close your eyes and muffle your ears. This is the world where you fall to your knees for the horror of you. Your heart a cowering and bruise-beaten animal, too heavy to ever rise over ash.

You’ll shudder and your smile will be red, red where you’ve bitten through the soft inner of your mouth. You’ll lick all the salt off your lips and when that fails you’ll let it fall to the ground, all that wetness hauled out by gravity.

I am nothing, you whisper, and the world sighs around you.

(It loves you, this world, and it makes you what you want to be.)

(Why does it love you?

Because you desire it so.)

This is the world where you drape yourself in pale silks and moonlight to hide the shivering boy-child that lurks your shadow.

(There are some ghosts that refuse exorcism.)

This is the world where you tilt your throat to be leashed, in gold and jade and a promise of ownership as love.

(You’ve never known any other kind of love.)

This is the world where dreams fall from your hands as false light. Because here you are, a lovely, counterfeit creature spun out of nothing. Illusions papered on as masks, painted as pigment on frail, sickly skin. Nothing you make is real, no sweetness you conjure will fill the stomach, no spark you create will illuminate the dark.

And in the end, an illusion is an illusion is-

Only an illusion.

(Saturn, your god murmurs, and it might be fate, it must be some kind of strange predestination.)

I am nothing, you whisper, as the flames flicker and die.

(And why are you nothing?

Because---)

[prediluvians-blog]

HEADCANON 002 --- TRUTHS

cw: body horror. minor character death.

There are numerous ways this goes, it’s propaganda or it’s memory or it’s nothing but the straight-laced, wholly unvarnished truth. And take your pick, but if it’s truth you choose- know there’ll always be more than one out there, snarling into your face like a famine-eaten mongrel to challenge your upright narrative.

Maybe one truth is this. It’s how bodies hoarding sunlight have it broken from them, shells cracked open like yolk from dripping egg. Or maybe husks split from hull to shriveled hull, fingers and nails prying for that sun-touched kernel rattling within. The point is: all those mortals, their blood-hot light hauled from marrow into the open night. Candles burn, and under the right heat, flesh will melt better than wax.

Do you see how well they burn? And by you, I mean- you do. (And you’re half-delirious but delirium isn’t a pair of blinkers, it’s a drug that corrodes you from the heart out, your head a sound-proofed echo-chamber for all the noise outside it.) The wind catches their screams and stuffs it back into empty and wanting mouths. Their mouths thirsty for air but the air is thirstier, all the oxygen clawing itself out of that cooked-meat smoke. All that flesh as fuel, and it means nothing at all.

Or maybe it’s a dream of embers, quivering. Look- from the dreamy eyes of a dew-dusted moon, too high and too distant to see humanity as anything but the pinpricks they are: tiny flame-flowers dancing in the lovely dark, a meadow of blooming, flickering light. They’re snuffed as all lights are; prayer candles extinguished by the wind. A village tenderly returned to dust.

If we’re returning to the human perspective (and human is subjective), maybe it’s dumb animal-hunger, the stupidity that comes of a beast reaching for something and rending it to shreds instead. I don’t want to die, translated into I want to live.

(And more often than not in this corner of the world, living is a zero-sum equation involving two or more insect lives. Where it’s eat or be eaten, and cannibalism is the cheapest option but it’s also the only choice on the market. So there’s only one of you, tough luck.)

(Your body has already undergone auto-cannibalism.)

Or maybe it’s just fire.

It doesn’t listen to reason, after all. It takes and it devours and it hunts with all the mindless mad-touched wild of the wind. Insatiate and greedy to fill a hunger that will never be full. It razes all the weight from your bones.

But, see: even bones are too heavy to beg weightlessness with, and there’s no sky to be found in smoke. Even when you’ve been hollowed out, scraped and scoured clean (or is it empty), there’s no rising above ash.

In the end maybe it doesn’t matter. Any and every truth, rendered smoke on the snow.

You’re on your knees and the fire has razed you but it will not raise you.

[chiajna-deactivated20231118]

“Преданный”

— a Russian word that means both “devoted” and “betrayed” 

[weltenwellen]

If I empty myself of will, will my soul give me peace?

Libby Bernardin, from “Transubstantiation” (via weltenwellen)

[prediluvians-blog]

@zoyaridzel​ location; kova

Once upon a time, there was a village in a desert. The village was a long way from from civilization, and at night the villagers lay awake and afraid in their hard beds, fearing a monster that dwelt in the village with them. This monster hid in the shadows of empty houses, it stole their belongings and ate through their stores of grain, and some said it had brought the famine that had plagued the village for many years. One night the villagers decided to light a fire to eat the monster, to smoke it out of the shadows and devour it whole.

They lit the fire and stoked it with kindling from their stoves, fanned it with hands and branches and the threadbare shirts off their backs. The fire burned high, and it smoked out the monster, and it devoured it whole, and the villagers lifted their arms and rejoiced. But the fire was still burning, and it burned higher, higher, higher. The villagers tried to put out the fire now, with handfuls of sand, and salt, and water, but the fire was hungry. It swallowed their paltry protests, and the bodies that threw them, and it would not go.

And in the morning the villagers were gone, and the village was gone, and finally the fire dwindled to a spark and was gone, and only the desert remained.

It’s a ramshackle hut, somewhere off in the middle of nowhere. Ownerless. A coordinate on a map, maybe. Just some slack and empty cradle, waiting to carry your coming narrative. Outside, the groan of mountains flayed raw by wind, all the snow whipping itself into a hunger frenzy- too mammoth and too mad to bother with this bare shack, wood pulled on wood in some shambling semblance of shelter.

In Kova, it’s not mercy that you look to the stars for, it’s a prayer for insignificance become invisibility. There’s no pity in nature, only apathy, and gods that bear no notice for the ants under their heel.

So this is how it is: two ants in a shelter, huddled in the scope of themselves- small, flickering things that bare fingers might snuff in the night. Saturn shivers and pulls his cloak tight around his shoulders, presses a palm against the frost-slick dirt. He stops thinking of all the dead histories lurking this place, waiting erasure by exposure. Or maybe erasure by subjugation: his shallow breath, colonizing all this derelict space. Someone must have lived here, not so long ago. But bodies bury themselves overnight, and scavengers will strip histories from wooden walls with the alacrity of orphans stuffing their mouths with soft tree bark and dandelion leaves. The storms will do the rest.

Once upon a time, he thinks, again. There was a boy in a forest who was running from wolves. But he tripped, you see, on a rock or a branch or an exposed tree root, and he fell, and so the wolves fell upon him and ripped off his skin. Tore it off with their gnashing teeth and savage claws, did it all in one go. And under the boy’s skin, under the boy’s skin---

The wolves found nothing but a stretch of rancid fur. Under the torn-away blood-blush of the boy’s face, slavering jaws and teeth. And the wolves were eaten right up.

He blinks. Focuses on the bridge of Zoya’s nose. A false attempt at eye-contact. His gaze searches to be anywhere but her face. Here: beneath the pliant flesh of his belly, his stomach freights itself with ice. Clawing up the steps of his spine. His exhale gathers mist. Inside his mouth, his teeth worrying against the inner of his cheek.

(An inclination: he could bite down until he tasted copper, something warm and slow flowing to thaw the numb of his tongue.)

Once upon a time, there was a boy swallowed by a fire. And the fire ate him right up, crept in through his mouth and his eyes and the pliant places under his wrist and behind his ear. It hollowed him out, you see, fed all the flesh from his bones and licked through crevices to find the sorry, shuddering blood kernel his ribs were hiding. It ate that up too, and-

Maybe the boy became a ghost, haunting his own soft-shelled body from the inside out. And on nights with moonlight you can see the way he turns translucent in the dark. Or maybe the fire hollowed him out because he wanted it to, because fires need spaces to burn and flames are stronger than hearts, and sometimes you can’t have both if you want to survive.

His palm presses deeper into dirt. His smile is a delicate counterfeit. Reaching his eyes but not in a way that suggests authenticity. It might, if the only other person in the shack wasn’t--- her. “Would you like to hear a story?”

[the-sea-of-immeasurable-loss]

“My body is covered with wounds this world made,”

— Rabia of Basra, tr. by Daniel Ladinsky from “Music; It Acts Like Love,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[lifeinpoetry]

In the dream where I am an island, / I grow green with hope. I’d like to end there.

Jericho Brown, from “Duplex (I Begin with Love),” published in the American Poetry Review  (via oiseauperdu)

[luthienne]

Lisel Mueller, “Necessities”

[lifeinpoetry]

A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.

Gillian Flynn, from Sharp Objects (via lifeinpoetry)

[finita--la--commedia]

If you bring your inexhaustible mouth to mine, I endlessly drink the roots of my own existence.

José Ángel Valente, “Be My Limit”, translated by Thomas Christensen In: “Landscape with Yellow Birds: Selected Poems by José Ángel Valente” (via finita--la--commedia)

[prediluvians-blog]

@archxngelic location; kova

Beneath his feet, the remains of a dead settlement. Like the bones of some long felled animal, its carcass scraped clean by snows and scavenger alike- it’s left behind a skeleton, bleached and still protruding. The survivors will have moved on weeks ago, though these ashes remain: wooden beams and derelict roofs, now the height of his ankle. Perhaps it was some kind of landslide, the earth groaning under its own weight: a yawn of motion that shifted mountains and ruined villages. Perhaps it was nothing more than slow rot: inevitable abandonment of a dying whole as silos ran dry and grain grew too thin, too early.

How many years has it been since Saturn has set foot in these barren lands. Following the tracks of two archangels, leading him--

Here.

Alone in all this cold, endless white.

Or, not alone. His eyes catch on the figure caught in still and captured poise, stood at some steep precipice. Compelling and impelling, a thread that loops his littlest finger and- tugs. Who, he asks, but the wind offers no answer. Only curls across his back, beckoning.

So he draws a vision or a version of himself close: long hair, gathering snow; a mouth red-lacquered but bitten blue beneath the paint; and light, glittering as ice or silver on his brow. Subtle shifts- until he lifts painted nails, chipped by weather, and knows without looking all the pale planes of his reflection. A traveler, a trader, a touch of-- stranger, that heart-sense drifting in blood, that abstract cognizance that this is a wanderer wandering in wrongness, detached and half untethered from this icy enclosure they inhabit. But if it is a sense of wrongness- it must be shared also by the gold-stained traveler who occupies this landscape with them. For the moment at least; they are laid on the same canvas, painted with the same brush.

He shivers, and above him the clouds continue their slow crumble, falling in uniform white. The snow erases Saturn’s footsteps with nature’s tender, cruel disregard for human history- until he is close, near enough to touch this stranger he had almost thought statue. With no path to track, no anchor or mooring behind him- does he still have a past?

[prediluvians-blog]

HEADCANON 001 --- HUNGER

Like an incision, clean cut from throat to sternum, he bleeds. Opens his body and coaxes the flow from his soft pulsed veins, strands of light pooling into honey gold. Until it brims to the throat and he stoppers each flask as it fills. One. Three. Four. Eight.

I can spare more, he thinks, caught in some reckless, ashen mood. When it aches so deeply, what does it matter- one incision deeper, a bloodletting gone too far. Until thirteen bottles line his feet, starlight trapped in amber resin, half molten and half abstract- in the right weather it might only be the gleam of afternoon sun, passing through glass.

And done at last, he slumps against the bedpost. There’s a shiver, stirring out of his muscles. A muscle memory of winter, coiled in hollowed bones and putting out feelers now, choking out his veins.

Dimly, he’s aware of a door opening, of someone else. Of a palm against his forehead, heat-soaked and mesmerizing. His eyes track upward, from waist to chest to throat, to the line of Jasper’s jaw, his skin steeped in sunlight. Some sense-awareness in his blood is fluttering, following the thud of Jasper’s heart, aligning itself to the steady pulse of a wrist. The sound of it, unraveling his reason. Hunger is opened like a wound in him, an ancient and cavernous and convulsing thing, a prayer for.

He shudders. Leaves the want untranslated.

This will pass.

It always passes.

[soracities]

And there’s a special kind of sadness that seems to come with spring…

Florence + The Machine, “South London Forever” (via soracities)

[prediluvians-blog]

sunisamai‌:

The smile emerges on his face and it half startles her, something organic in a face that seems like it could be blown away at any section, an expression that looks crafted, looks painted on. He looks even younger then, concealing gossamer silk blown away for a burning youthful gaze that settles into something sharp. Something carved into it’s place from the world around them.

But a smile graces her lips even as leans back and beckons the bartender over, watching as he watches her. She knows that he wouldn’t be old enough to knight, still a squire, even if the weight of the world and a sureness in this place seem to trick her. He’s not untouched by this world, but children loose their innocence when they pass their first decade (unless that child is her).

She nods her head to the seat next to her, watching him sit with a delicate grace. She asks for another whiskey before letting him order his own drink. Who is she to deny him (other than an officer of the law), when he seems so at home in this place?

“What are you, twenty years old?” 

What is she - six? How long has she been aware of the world, how much experience has she truly gone through? Who is to say that this boy is not older than her in every way but one? 

Twenty, the woman asks, assumes. Saturn has worn bodies stooped with age, the livery of broad-shouldered and fat-bellied tradesmen, the silks and jade of noblewomen, their crimson lips and painted lashes. But this--

How many winters has this body survived? Perhaps street urchins in the alleys of Paol and Tsuki keep a scattered count, origin stories like fables, whispered on moonless nights to brush dust from the myths- my mother gave birth to me during the long winter, we ate nothing but radishes and tree bark that year; I left after the flood destroyed our farm, my father couldn’t feed us all; after I was born the plague took both my brothers- events matched to date matched to imprecise age. But in Kova there are no landmarks to anchor your years: each winter as mordant as the last, spring a herald of sickness and death. To keep count in such places is only to tally down the days of impending mortality.

“Give or take.” Five and twenty, to an academic looking for an intellectual equal. Nineteen, to a man who had assumed youth and wouldn’t accept anything above that bracket. Twenty-three, he almost says, effortless, but a breeze from an open window catches the words before they spill. Slides them back into his mouth; soft as a secret, dissipating on his tongue. Intuition or instinct, so he lets it go.

Give or take, and it is true enough.

His fingers close about the neck of a sake bottle left on the counter, the porcelain hot beneath the damp cloth he lifts it with. Constructs are composed of a hundred individual threads, habit and mannerism and the hackneyed edges of routine. In a place like this alcohol is expected, and therefore necessary. And blending in is the swiftest route towards vanishing.

“This is an uncommon haunt for those from the Crystal City.” The sake is acrid on his tongue, a taste he doubts will ever be acquired. He refills his cup, runs a thumb along the red-lacquered rim. “Do you raise your glass to pay tribute?”

[prediluvians-blog]

@fidaeques circa 995 --- flashback

On the balcony, the string notes of a koto. Biting as a bee-sting against the artist’s fingers. But background noise, against the clusters of opulent nobles and their jewel-leashed companions. All this gleam and smokeless smoulder as dizzy as some heat-haze dream. Distracted and disoriented, Saturn glances up- perhaps just in time. His steps falter, wage a wrestling match between withdrawing or simply stopping.

“Apologies,” he says, deciding the collision course averted but contact inevitable. And, well, these celestial bodies stuffed into a marble-walled expanse, melting all this upholstery into pure and cold light, you might call it luck that it took all of an evening.

And he’s seen this face before.

(Two moons ago, a different time but the same steps to the same dance: graceful fingers clasped around his shoulder, heavying the press of silk against his throat. A murmur leading his sight.

Yuna. The demure princess cloaked by attendants. Her face lifting from the ground as she notices some familiar acquaintance, all careful reticence and docile doe-eyes. Birdlike (and does that mean delicate- song-saturated and soft-boned, all cartilage and no bitter marrow- or does it mean caged). Camille, and a shift of posture guides attention to the figure at her side. All the while soft words ghosting Saturn’s ear, a shiver of heat caught at his spine and held- raveled tight lest it be felt, lest it be found. He distracts himself with the bone-bitter tang of sake, the dry press of porcelain rubbed against his thumb.

In the corner, fat bones draped in weighty flesh and light-slick rubies, clutching an ivory-handled cane. The fable of power in flies gathering around rot-soaked meat, the courtesans and courtiers who pay their due homage; Hisae, a business partner.

And there, a press of skin directs him to the center of the room, to the dark shade at the Moon Empress’ shoulder. A shift of sky spills sun from an ivy-laden window, recasts shadow into shimmering light. There, fleetingly, a glimpse of the sanctified divine. Endymion.)

“I...” He wonders, briefly, of how a mortal should address their god. If the thought itself is not entirely ludicrous. “They say it is rare to see you, cleaved from the Empress’ side.”

... As though one-sided familiarity will forgive impertinence. He hides a wince.

[hapless-hollow]

He wants to dress me in that shroud again - the black-blood dress that reflects his aches like murder. To hide me beneath the fabrics like a sheath. I am not to speak. I am not to speak. I will be fashioned into Mary - virginesque, and carry all my filthy wants, underneath.

Helaena Moon @ http://hapless-hollow.tumblr.com/ (via hapless-hollow)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

and still I’m nothing to you but a hole in your heart.

Paul Celan, tr. by Paul Weinfield, from “With your Hand Full of Hours,” (via violentwavesofemotion)