TUC Week, Day three!
A very late and very chaotic submission to Day Three: Prophecy/Bane
The prophecy of Bane, and the five senses.
Sight
Ares looks at the two sleeping forms – one his bond, one a pup. One the Warrior, one the Bane. The little rat rolled over in his sleep, into Ares’s outstretched wing. He almost recoiled at that, a lifetime of hating rats behind him. But he was also bonded to Gregor now, he’d protected Boots enough times, to understand why the Bane could not be killed. And so Ares wrapped himself around the pup, to keep it warm.
Against his charcoal wing, its fur looked so much whiter. It was strange, for an all-powerful being to be so vulnerable. White fur in the Underland, Ares could not think of a worse predicament. Had he not used his own dark robe many a time to escape notice? Perhaps it was poetic justice then, that the Bane, who was supposed to have everything – speed, strength, spirit – was easy to spot. Perhaps they would have one advantage, then, if it came down to fighting it. And Ares had little doubt that the Bane would rise to power, eventually. Power, leadership, they were too tempting gifts to refuse (Henry had not). But Ares actually had a little doubt, a small sliver of hope in him, that perhaps this tale would end well. Gregor had given him that.
Ares watches over his bond, his dark skin and hair. They were well-matched, it seemed, after all. For Ares had loved Henry, deeply, but he found himself actually liking Gregor, thinking of him as a good person. In his sleep, the boy looked younger, too young to have lost a sister, only a pup himself. Ares will stand by him, through the trials to come. He settles next to him, his dark fur blending with Gregor’s curls, watches over him.
In dark, in flame, in war, in strife.
Touch
All her life, Twitchip had navigated through scent. Scents were her first memories, her mother’s fur, the warm smell of milk, the familiar scent of her litter. They are her best memories as well: decadent feasts, a lover’s arms, the apples in the Garden. Her worst memories too of course, were driven by smell: the sharp scent of her cave by the serpents, the stench of hate in the air as gnawers encircled her. But now, with her nose smashed, Twitchtip is nothing more than a normal rat, or perhaps even less.
She is stripped of everything here. It has been days since she has eaten anything. They cut off her tongue, and it is so quiet and dark here, it is difficult to rely on echolocation. And even when she can, well, there’s not much to see in the pit.
But she can touch. She can slowly go around it, feeling every crevasse, the sharp edges, the smooth dips in the stone. She explores it’s a great big landscape instead of a few feet of stone. Twitchtip had always seen things others did not, entire worlds wafting in through her nose. And so she curls up in a corner, paw sliding on the wall, breathes in deeply through the pain. She thinks of Queen Luxa fighting back to back with her, of Gregor’s warm leg against her fur, of little Boots trying to tap on her wound to cure her. Ow! I no touch. She thinks of the feeling of Gregor’s life jacket, gripping him for dear life, closes her eyes, and tries to hold on.
Smell
No one asks Temp, but he smells it too.
Something is wrong with the water. They have a word for it in crawler, but in the human tongue he cannot think of one. The water is dancing in strange ways, circling itself, round and round and round again. Temp does not speak up, because no one will listen, besides the Princess of course. The Princess always listens to Temp. And the Warrior might, perhaps, although he is easily distracted, and, as all humans, he trusts his own more.
Temp clings to the princess, ready to defend her, but the fliers are fast, and he distracts her enough so that she does not dive after her brother. When Gregor comes back, coughing up water and holding on to a gnawer, Temp thinks it is not surprising that they are of the same blood.
And so Temp learns his lesson, and speaks up when they reach the island. Twitchtip is right, it is recent. The island still quakes like a young one, eager to grow. But the bugs, oh the bugs. Temp knows their smell. They are… the word is… Yet again, there is no one here to understand the clicking, and so they do not listen. The flier goes down in seconds, like Temp had known she would, because he had seen many a warmblood collapse under thousands of bugs. How they always underestimate the insects.
Flesh-eating. Whirlpool. Temp stores the words away as new vocabulary, and keeps protecting the Princess, waiting for the next danger he will not be able to name.
Hearing
At every pitter-patter of feet in front of their door, Grace jumps up. It’s never them though, never her son and daughter coming home. She sits at the kitchen table for hours in the night, watching the withering shadow of a man who wears her husband’s face. Whenever there’s a little crack or an echo, she’s up, running out, wrenching the door open. But the hallway is empty, and so Grace sits back down, and continues to wait, the faint melody of Christmas songs reaching her from the street. She tries to convince herself that they came back after mere weeks last time, but Jonathan had taken years to come back, long, hollow years.
Sometimes, she sits in the laundry room and stares into the tunnel that has swallowed her children, and listens to the faint hum of the currents. If she scooted a little bit closer, they would swallow her whole. She would join them down there, and defend them, and bring them home. But Grace has Lizzie, and Jonathan, and Grandmother. She has other people sitting on her hunched shoulders. But she does allow herself this moment, to kneel in front of the tunnel and listen to the currents, wait for them to spit her children back.
Taste
Andromeda laid down a few fishes next to him, gave him a sympathetic nudge, and then promptly fell asleep on the raft, wings wrapped around Mareth’s unconscious form. Even if he could not feel it, or her warmth, she still held him close. Because that was what a bond was: devotion, no matter the conditions. That was what Howard should have been, for Pandora. He should have gone after her somehow, he should have helped her, he should have been more careful… Despite the journey, the wounds, the loss of Luxa, nothing feels sharper than the pain of losing his bat.
He carefully scrapes his knife against the scales, cuts through the fish, takes out the innards and rinses the flesh in the clean water. He removes the head, and cuts himself little heaps of it. He leaves a half for Andromeda, and then slowly gulps down the rest, taking bits at a time. He stares out at the Waterway, and weeps. The fish tastes like long afternoons swimming with Pandora, sharing shellfish and squid, afternoons escaping his family always too full of children and crying, Susannah counting her loved ones and always coming up short. Howard was an eldest, and a proud one; he helped people, he loved people, he invented songs. But with Pandora, spending hours eating raw fish and seafood, there he could rest, and think only of himself and his bond for a few hours. He thinks about giving Boots his portion of bread, her indignant yuck! at the taste of raw fish as he chews, the iodine taste spreading on his tongue. Somewhere behind him, Gregor was wandering through a maze, avenging his sister. Howard had not lost a sibling just yet, but he had been old enough when Hamnet had died. He hadn’t been shielded at all, and so he had seen his mother collapse to the ground at the news. Yes, somewhere, Gregor was doing what he could to survive this loss.
The fish is almost done. He pauses for a second, thinking about how he would have good-naturedly bickered with Pandora about getting the last bit. About the fact that she’d died exploring, tasting, the way she would have wanted to.
He knows it’s silly, and wasteful. But he doesn’t take the last bit, drops it into the water, watches it disappear into the deep.
You take it, Pan.
