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 Posted: Thu Feb 09, 2017 8:34 pm
 Resignation
“Will you be ready to kill Adonis?” Hart asked him as the night fell. There were no stars tonight, nor a moon—everything was hidden by a thick curtain of clouds. The Lightbreaker watched their motion, illuminated in one spot by the light of the moon. He could smell the scent of a waiting storm wafting from the horizon.
“I am,” he said.
“It won’t bother you?” pressed Hart. “In the moment, can you imagine it? Pressing a knife into his hide—watching him die. It won’t bother you?”
The Lightbreaker shook his head. He tried to picture the sight of the light leaving Adonis’ sun-bright hide, the sight of his eyes failing, the light within extinguished. It did not move him. He tried to picture the hand on the knife as his own, and still—nothing moved him. He shook his head.
“No,” he concluded. “It won’t.”
Hart looked at him, hesitating, her expression shifting between determination and concern. At last, she only sighed and ducked her head and slid again to the shelter of his shoulder. He let her take possession of him without fuss or reaction. He had almost grown accustomed to her touch on his skin, even though it felt like sandpaper on a burn.
His own desires didn’t matter. There was no room for him in his own brain, in his skin, in his body. His borrowed soul was not even his own. So what did it matter? Whether he thought of her hitting him in his healing wound, of her biting into his lip without consent, every time her fingers ghosted his arm or the nape of his neck—that didn’t matter, either.
It was how things were, and he was tired of fighting it. No matter what his dreams said. No matter what bullshit they promised. None of those people were here to help him, and Hart was. So she was allowed to touch him now, if that’s what she wished.
It was a complete resignation.
“Another week,” she murmured into him. “And then we shall act.”
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Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 8:07 am
Fever Dream V
His brain lurched to understand—was he awake or asleep? There was no inherent dreamlike quality to this space, and there was nothing but pure pitch black, as though he’d achieved vision while his eyes were still closed.
He pulled himself up with difficulty into a seated position, looking around himself. There seemed to be nothing—not Hart, not the large shapes of the shipping pods, not the edge of a ship or the ocean beyond. He was alone in nothingness, with only the cold puff of his breath for contrast in that nothing.
He frowned, irritated. Another dream?
His back ached as he tried to lift himself without the use of his crutches. For a moment, panic gripped him—he’d taken steps backwards in his therapy? But no—no. It was the dream, he told himself, letting out a soft curse.
There was nothing to afford him purchase, nothing to leverage himself up with. Well, there was the ground—he could, at least, crawl.
He pushed onto his palm and skirted forward, then paused. Where was he even going? He waited for someone to appear—the small pomegranate girl, perhaps? Or the one crafted delicately from ice? Their names were fuzzy in his mind. He bade them to materialize. The sooner they gave him their information, the sooner he could be done with the dream. They were fast exhausting him.
“Are you alright?”
A voice rang through the dark, strong and warm. He snapped his head up, his ears perking.
“Who is it?” he croaked back into the unseen space.
“You don’t know?” There was a rich amusement to the words, but the inflection was concerned. “That’s really not great.”
He pushed forward again onto his palm, grasping the ground, slithering forward. He tried to concentrate, his head feeling like it had been stuffed with tinder and dry hay. There was something. A Spanish accent. A pleasant, clear quality to the tone.
He pushed forward.
“Who are you?” the voice asked in return. The amusement had evaporated from it. “Tell me you at least know that.”
“I am the Lightbreaker,” he managed, his voice flicking between his teeth as his nails grated against the nothing that was the ground, propelling him another few inches forward.
“Yikes,” said the voice.
He didn’t answer, concentrating on moving forward, trying to crawl toward the voice’s origin.
“You’re in pretty bad shape, huh? Why don’t you use your wings?”
“I don’t have any ******** wings,” he replied in a groan, his muscles straining. “Give me a crutch.”
“No,” said the voice. “Get your goddamn wings back.”
“I can’t. The light left me,” he seethed, the irritation growing into anger. Sweat was beginning to bead on his forehead, sliding down in his hair to his neck. “The dawn left me. I’ve tried. I’ve tried.”
“Nothing worth doing is easy,” mused his companion.
“That’s real ******** easy to say,” he barked, continuing his crawl. His back protested with a creaking frustration as he labored.
“You’re doing the same things over and over again,” continued the voice. “And getting frustrated when it doesn’t work. I thought we all tried to tell you how to do it.”
“The dreams?” He sneered, stopping, his breath thick and heavy. He squinted, unable to even see his hands against the ground: only the white of his breath as it came quick, quick, quick, from his lungs. He tried to catch his breath, slow his heart. “I -don’t understand. Don’t understand how—how just hearing… ‘keep going' helps.”
“Who are you?” The voice demanded again, closer this time. He turned his head up to the noise, sat back, putting a hand on his chest. His heart thudded like the pounding of hoofbeats in the forest. He tried to breathe; easy, easy now.
“The Lightbreaker,” he said.
“I can’t help you if that’s all you got.”
“That’s who I am.”
“That’s your name? Come on.”
His breath became shaky.
“Come on,” the voice urged, gentler. “Anyone can be a wild deer. It takes a lot more to be what you are. You were never afraid of forging another path when you had a compass. Why’re you so scared now? You know who you are. You know what you are. Come on.”
The syllables escaped him when he tried to pronounce them. He chewed on them, tried to pin them to his tongue.
“I’m made of the stags that betrayed me,” he said. “And the dawn that cast me off.”
“It doesn’t matter what you’re born of,” said the voice. “Your heart’s yours, isn’t it?”
“Who are you?” he whined.
“Tell me your name.”
“I’m the Lightbreaker.”
“Tell me your name.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Come on!” the voice was closer still now, just beyond him, just an arm’s reach away.
He looked down, pulling his bottom lip into his teeth, his heart slowing in his chest. Every nerve, every fibre, every atom that made him, seemed to be holding its breath.
“My name is Rhedefre,” he said, quiet, into the dark.
A spark ignited, cleaving a path in the darkness, like a match on a gasoline trail. He looked up and saw a hand outstretched to him and a face that startled him, drawing back, his heart in his throat.
Warm eyes. A quiet smile. And hair of a vivid and living pink.
“C’mon, Cesc,” he heard himself say. “You know who you are. Get us the ******** out of here.”
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Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2017 8:32 pm
Rolling in the Deep Rain pelted his face, startling him awake. He sat up with alarm, looking around himself. Hart moaned beside him and sat up, rubbing her eyes with the heel of one hand. She made a sour face at the rain and shook herself, transforming at once into the form of a hind.
“The storm came,” she groaned, groggy and displeased.
Cesc scrubbed the rain from his eyes as it began falling harder, his curls starting to droop with the weight of the water. Something was not right. There was a rectangle of light at the corner of his vision. The door to the holds—the door was open.
He half-rose, looking for a figure in the darkness. The door was still open, so someone had to have come out from—
“3224…3224…s**t!” Cesc heard an accented voice say, and managed to turn just in time to see the man jogging in the rain in what looked to be a plastic windbreaker. The storm was beginning to pick up in earnest, the black ocean churning below them. The ship continued to cleave through it with pure neutrality, the waves splashing up higher around its metal bow.
Cesc swallowed roughly, watching the man slip on the slick metal floor. It was him—Cesc’s collateral damage. He hadn’t returned in better weather because he’d broken his nose. Beside Cesc, Hart was also struggling for purchase, her hooves slipping as they continued to try to stay upright. The metal pods shuddered in the wind, the sound like an old groan of protest.
The man jiggled the door of 3224, cursing himself. The door of the pod was kept shut by only a single faithful lock, the other ones broken in the wind. The metal door was trying to yawn open in the motion of the wind, and the man was trying desperately to close it with another lock. Cesc crept closer, watching him. <******** nose,” the man was complaining. “******** nose! How did I forget to come back?”
He took off one of the broken locks and tried to secure another one onto it. Fumbling, he dropped the lock onto the ground, and in bending to pick it up, caught sight of something gold in his vision. Cesc gripped Hart and pushed her into the unseen side of the opposite pod, an explosion of expletives unleashed in his mind. Hart’s eyes became wide and frightened, and her body trembled beneath Cesc’s palm.
“Hello?” the man asked, pulling a flashlight from his windbreaker. “Is—is someone out here?”
The wind roared over his voice, and he tried to speak again, looking back at his original task with hesitation. He swallowed, then fearfully called out again. “Hello? Nathan? ”
He took a step toward them, and Cesc pressed Hart harder, as though he could phase them both through the metal wall and into a proper hiding spot. The rain came down in sheets, making a river of their corridor. His shirt was clinging to him like a second skin, his hair streaming down his forehead.
The man continued to creep forward, one hand on the railing of the ship, his flashlight of barely any use in the rain. Lightning illuminated the sky in a show of force, and he half-gasped, gripping the flashlight for dear life. The ship lurched and the man did too, the light falling from his grasp and sliding cleanly off the railing and into the water.
“Don’t,” Hart whispered to Cesc, her voice frightened. “Don’t.”
Cesc watched the man with his heart in his throat.
The man staggered, gripping onto the railing. “********!” he shouted, trying to step forward. He pulled on the railing and righted himself, pushing the rain out of his eyes with one hand. He half-looked over the railing and Cesc saw it in slow motion—
“Don’t!” Hart pleaded, her voice shrill.
Lightning flashed.
The man’s body shuddered with the force of another of the ship’s sudden motion. Hart slipped and slid away from Cesc, stopping as she hit another metal container, but the man, the man had nothing in his way—
He slid across the railing and into the dark below.
Cesc let out a bellow and leapt forward, grabbing hold of the railing and swiping the air. He screamed into the storm wind, and he could hear the faint sound of Hart’s cry behind him. She was trying to race toward him, all four hooves scrambling.
“Don’t!” she screamed, transforming into a woman once more, crawling toward him.
He squinted as he stared down into the water. Could he see the bright plastic of his windbreaker? ********! Could he even swim!? Cesc had no time to think. He grabbed a round orange life preserver from beside him and he did it.
A wild deer leapt into the crushing black waters of the ocean.
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Posted: Sat Feb 11, 2017 8:59 am
Rolling in the Deep II
Hart’s scream followed Cesc all the way down. He barely had time to draw a breath before the jaws of the ocean snapped all around him. It forced his head down with a power he could not believe, jerking him and his life preserver around without any thought to his desires. He held his breath and swirled in place.
Something was beckoning him. Something was breaking in him.
He could see it—see it in the blackness, like his dream. Nothingness and powerlessness, and in the dark, a pink-purple line like lightning, showing him a path. He could barely hold onto it in the swirling of the waters, but there—there it was—just out of grasp. A line of fire, flickering in nothing.
He reached out his hand to it. He could feel it at his fingertips.
I understand, he told it. He told the lightning and the moonlight: he understood them. The dawn may have left him, the sun may have seared through him, but they, they would still listen to his whispers. He understood: This is where he was meant to be. Live or die.
----
Hart screamed until her breath was gone, and then she screamed again.
The idiot child! She thought she had reached him, and then he goes and he does this—he kills himself for nobody! For a stranger! She screamed and screamed and screamed, watching the rope of the life preserver taut in the water. She looked for him but could see nothing in the flashes of lightning and the bare light of the moon. If he was attached to the preserver, then maybe, maybe she could pull him up from the darkness, could save him, yell at him.
She pulled on the rope but her partner in tug-of-war was terrific. It was like pulling a chain attached to a building and hoping its foundations would move. She screamed again, tears overflowing her eyes and weakening her grip.
“SERTORIUS!” she yelled into the wind. “SERTORIUS!”
The lightning stabbed at the water.
It was faint and strange and impossible, but she heard something. Over the storm, over the waves, over the rumble of thunder.
A yell.
She held onto the railing with white knuckles, staring into the black beyond. What was it?
There was a color in the water.
In the next flash of lightning, she could see him.
The Lightbreaker was screaming.
His head had broken the water, his mouth open. He was yelling.
Lightning again struck, but this time, it did not disappear. It held in the water. It held at the Lighbreaker.
He yelled and it heeded him with a respect, electricity flickering into the air like livewire, catching onto him. It broke in a bizarre and familiar pattern—up to the sky from the face of the sea: the shape of a stag’s rack. Her eyes rounded and she could see the Lightbreaker fully down at the boat’s bow, his hair as electric as the lightning, his mouth and eyes still open in his cry. The lightning held and gripped his back, and she saw its light burn into his body, becoming wings that stretched all the way into heaven.
He ducked his head and rose, with it, his body floating upward. The lightning snapped from the clouds and the wings became fully his, beating once and with power as he flew from the angry sea, his arms full of the body of another man. He again had antlers, split and numerous like the lightning’s arms. He was wild and strange and brimmed with the light’s power.
Cesc landed on the shipside with his quarry, his hair and wings the color of the lightning’s pink, his wings nearly white with its power. His eyes and rune shone like live electricity in the darkness.
She watched him with shock on her face as he landed and dropped the man, immediately opening the man’s mouth and breathing into it. He pressed compressions on his chest—one, two, three—and then the man began to cough and sputter, turning onto his side.
“Lightb—“ she began to say, and he looked up at her with livid eyes.
“We aren’t safe yet,” he cut her off.
The ship lurched again, but this time, Cesc was prepared. His expression was ghoulish and almost giddy as he put out a hand and watched as a line of light closed the railing solidly, the rain splashing against it.
Cesc gathered the body of the man and rose.
“Come with me!” he yelled at Hart, starting down the corridor to the hold doors. She slid and he half-turned toward her, his wings spreading wide behind him. Another line of light, like a rope, connected them. Above her, a roof, a shelter, that rain spat against but could not break.
She ran, stunned and silent, behind him, and said nothing until they went behind the hold doors and Cesc swung them shut.
“Lightbreaker,” she gasped at him, staring wide-eyed at him in the artificial light. “Is that you?”
“My name is Rhedefre,” he said.
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Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 9:53 am
Guardian Angel
The man awoke in the hold stairwell, his eyes focusing in the dark. He gasped, half-rising. He was shoeless—how was he shoeless? The bandage had been ripped from his nose. He was shoeless and he felt as though he’d been whipped, and his lungs ached. What had happened?
“Hi.”
A voice came from beside him, startling him further. It was the strangest sight he’d ever seen—a creature made of vibrant and living light, breathing it in and out, with no pupils or irises, only stark white light. Wings! Massive, far-reaching wings. He started further, and nearly slid down the steps.
“Waaaatch it there, watch out,” said the figure, grabbing the man’s shoulder and steadying him. “You took a tumble off the side of the ship.”
“What—what—“ said the man, righting himself. He indicated to Cesc’s wings, his jaw slack. “Are you—are you an angel?”
There was a long pause.
“Sure,” said his companion. “Yes. I’m the angel for this part of the ocean only, so don’t go doing that again, alright? I took care of 3224 for you. Don’t go back out there, alright?”
The man stared at him with wild eyes. The angel patted him on the shoulder again.
“You’re okay,” he told him. “Go get checked out, but you’re okay. I’m going to go back out and do some more angel-ing, but you keep yourself safe, you got it?”
The man nodded dumbly. The angel smiled at him gently.
“Thank you,” managed the man.
“No way,” said the creature with a boyish laugh. A quiet good-humor and calm emanated from it. “You’re the one who helped me.”
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Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2017 8:42 pm
 A Difficult Conversation
As Cesc regains his powers from hundreds of miles away, the homefront begins to lose hope that he will ever return. *
One day at a time.
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Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 8:22 am
A Turning Tide The seas were calm in the morning.
It was the strangest feeling of homecoming Cesc had ever felt. The dawn rose and it was like discovering a lost sense, a deaf man hearing. It was with only the slightest feeling of bitterness that he heard the dawn’s laughter once more, felt her fingers caress his hair. He wanted to sneer at it: you left me, you a*****e.
But the dawn was so contrite. She smoothed the electricity from the light within him. She made his hair a calmer pink, made his wings more manageable and less temperamental. She returned his eyes to him. And she seemed to rejoice in her ability to interact with him once more.
Hart watched him throughout the morning with amazement.
“How?” she asked after hours, sitting beside him, her eyes tracing the curl of his hair, the branch of his antlers. She touched them, astonished. “They’re real. And the wings—you are yourself again, Lightbreaker?”
“I am myself again,” he affirmed, half-smiling.
“I cannot believe it,” she murmured. “You are. My blood—you banished it. You healed yourself. Or the lightning healed you—I am not sure.”
“I lost my connection to light,” he said. “I didn’t realize I had another one.”
She nodded. “Lightning?”
“No.” There was a gentle amusement in his voice. “Lightning’s just light, same as moonlight or sunlight. I had something else.”
“What was it?”
“Goodwill,” said the stag. “I feed off goodwill, but I was too angry to feed myself that way. My dreams kept trying to tell me, but I didn’t want to listen.”
She blinked, looking at him with her eyebrows raised, nonplussed.
“Amazing,” she repeated, quiet. She reached out a hand to touch one of his curls, and he flinched away.
“Hart,” he said, his voice strong. “Please. That’s enough.”
She drew back as though he had bitten her, her hand recoiling.
“I see,” she said, quiet.
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Posted: Mon Feb 13, 2017 5:21 pm
His Wings Cesc sat outside in the sun. He stripped off his shirt and laid it in a patch of sunlight to dry, and in the meanwhile he sat, catching light and crushing it in his hand and letting it slip away like sand.
He did it, over and over and over again.
It felt like a miracle every time he did it. And every time, every single time, he marveled at it anew.
He would, he promised himself, never take the power for granted again.
“Are you practicing?” asked Hart from behind him.
She stepped across him and sat at a slight distance, watching him. He lifted his eyes to her.
“It’s hard not to—“ he replied, and as he spoke, light surged within him, melting his irises into golden sclera, his pupils becoming sunspots, “—over do it.”
He blinked away the surge of power, his irises reforming, and smiled. Her breath, caught in her chest, fluttered from her lungs like startled birds. She calmed herself with a few more breaths, dropping her gaze.
“Not feeling unnecessarily modest this time?” she asked after a moment, nodding to his drying shirt.
“Nothing you haven’t seen already,” he replied with a shrug. Reaching behind him, he tugged a feather loose from his wings and began to alter it, turning it into an arrow, then a sword, then laying it flat against his skin and molding it into a glove.
Hart squinted as she watched him work, one hand at her chest. “It is a breathtaking power,” she said. “It is not difficult?”
“Like riding a bike,” Cesc replied. He paused, his eyes dropping to his ribbon. “…or so they tell me.”
“I see,” Hart laughed. She rose and stepped around him in a smooth circle, as though she were trying to discern his skill from every angle. Cesc continued to work without self-consciousness: the glove became a gauntlet, then pulled from his knuckles and formed into a dagger.
It was easier now than it used to be, Cesc admitted privately. The lightning, the moonlight—whatever it was that jolted him back into his powers had pushed him forward a fair bit, too.
“That,” murmured Hart, looking at the dagger, “is going to be rather a useful ability.”
She leaned forward while standing behind him, and Cesc could feel the hairs lifting on the nape of his neck. He stiffened, a rebuke forming on his lips, but Hart spoke before he could say anything.
“I knew it,” she said firmly. He felt her hand on his back once more, her fingers below his scapula, and his spine straightened like a rod.
“Hart—“ he said in warning.
“Your wings.” Hart spoke over him. “They are unformed. They stream from the cuts in your back like—like rays of light escaping beneath a curtain. It does not look like true wings of feather and bone. These are…” she struggled for words. “Leaks.”
Cesc twisted toward her, his eyebrows lifted. “I’m pretty sure my wings are tangible when I want them to be.”
“Every light is tangible when you want it to be,” she countered. “Try—try to pull them within you. I’ll wager you can.”
Lifting his eyebrows, Cesc thought about dismissing her, but his dislike of her could not overcome what felt like truth in her discovery. If she was right, so many other things suddenly made sense—how his wings shattered when his equilibrium was upset, or how he’d lost them so quickly when his light disintegrated in contact with her blood. His wings hadn’t become flesh and bone, unable to become light. They’d disappeared completely, unable to become hardened into flesh.
And when he was young and uncomfortable with his appearance, he’d expended so much energy trying to keep them tangible at all times, trying to fit in with what he’d seen other Raevans look like and do.
And if they were a leak of his light and his power, didn’t it make sense how broadly his aura tended to reach?
Couldn’t they be so, so much more than wings, in that case?
Closing his eyes, Cesc concentrated. He tried to pinpoint the feeling in his back where his wings escaped. He tried to imagine drawing them back, pulling them in the way someone would draw in a breath. He tried to visualize it, his wings disappearing—but not into the air and into sunlight, into himself, into the space between his back and his chest…
Suddenly, he felt a strange rush of power, like a light bulb overpowered by electricity. He gasped, his eyes splitting open, and saw Hart’s face, her jaw slack and her lips parted and her eyes round.
Immediately, he lost control of it, the breath leaving him as though he’d been winded, his wings splaying back out of his scapula like a spring.
“Astounding,” praised Hart, her hands coming together. She bent forward eagerly, her eyes wide. “They’re—they’re just fountains of your light. How did it feel? When you drew them within?”
“It felt like a—like an overload,” said Cesc, catching his breath. “Like a power surge on a circuit.”
“A refreshment,” amended Hart with a nod. “You—you could use it, if you wanted, when you fought. Or, Lightbreaker, your wings, you could use them for anything other than flight. Fold them over you, harden them—you could make them into the strongest armor of light. You could save yourself from my knife ever penetrating your flesh.”
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Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2017 7:55 am
Homecoming
The harbor was coming into view.
The stag sat in the shadow of the pod, before a mirror he’d fashioned from light. She’d watched him do it with amazement in her eyes, and then saw him snap off a sunbeam for a knife. He sat in front of the mirror and shaved with the shard as though it were a straight-razor, his beard quickly disappearing with his deft movements. A boyish face slowly reappeared.
Hart hemmed and hawed and hesitated.
“With finality, I ask you: Do you know what you shall do? When you see Adonis,” she asked him at last. The port was fast approaching in the horizon line.
Cesc lifted his head to watch the trees come into view. The air was biting and cold once more, and the skies were a heavy grey. He knew these lands, and they were thick with memories.
“Yes,” he told her again, his voice mild and measured. “I will take care of him.”
Some of the tension unwound itself from her shoulders. She twisted her fingers. “I’m glad.”
Hart turned her head toward him, her face pale. “If your friend is still alive,” she said, “you must know that he will still desire to murder you above all else. You—you must know this. He will not show you mercy. It will be the only desire of his heart, a darkness from which he will not be free.”
He turned his attention back to the mirror. There was a strange sort of determination in his face that Hart could not quite place, and that—that worried her more than she could say.
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Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2017 8:01 pm
Home Again
They docked in the port well before sunrise.
The air was bitterly cold, and the movements of the sailors happy to once again be on land made their escape easier than their initial stowing away had been. It was without incident that soon they were on land once more, moving quickly away from the ship, the desert, and all their memories.
“We should go to the preserve,” Hart whispered to the stag.
Cesc nodded, but his eyes were distant.
“I have one stop on the way, first,” he said.
“You want to go home?”
“No,” said Cesc, shaking his head. “I just want to see it. Remember it exists.”
“You… you would put them in danger if you brought them with us,” warned Hart.
“I don’t want to bring them with us,” said Cesc. “It’s been two months. They’ve mourned me for dead by now.” He smiled, an earnest expression. “I mean it. I just want to see.”
---
The snowfall was making bright the night.
Vivi sat up by the window with a shawl around her shoulders, her legs curled beneath her on the faded red velvet of her favorite chair. Beside her, Grumpaws slept, his breath between a snore and a purr. A clock ticked as the only sound in a silent room. She did not sleep.
She watched the way the flakes fell, the way they fluttered in the wind. The way they accumulated on the ground. It was not often that they got snow in February as they were now.
The day would be starting soon. She rose from her chair and pulled out her hiking clothes. Today she would go again to the preserve. She would find evidence of where the stags, the hunter, were. Every day she felt as though she was getting closer. She only needed the clues to find them—and then she and Iorek would do the work. They would exact revenge.
She pulled on her gloves and looked out the window once more to the falling snow.
Part of her wished to stay home, to curl into Shepard’s bed, to sleep in the comfort and safety of his arms. There was a part of her that was tired. That wanted to grieve.
There was movement outside, figures. Vivi leaned forward toward the window pane, feeling the drop of temperature and the coldness of the air as she did so. She leaned so close she almost bumped her forehead into the glass.
Were her eyes playing tricks on her?
In the darkness, far beyond, amongst the falling snow, she saw him.
Vivi gasped, a strangled sound, and put both palms to the window. He was standing beside a woman dressed in all black. He held something in his hand—a malformed crutch that he wasn’t using, but still held, relaxed, by his side. His face was solemn. His eyes were quiet. But it was him.
There was something in his expression that silenced the scream that was bubbling in her throat. Her lips parted but no sound came from it.
He did not look up at her. He said something to the woman beside him and sighed and then turned away, and Vivi was left alone, her knees shaking and her legs weak.
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Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2017 10:13 am
More than One
Bucephalus was uneasy.
He had watched the woman for weeks now. He could not say exactly why; she wanted to end him and his kind, he ascertained fairly quickly. She was doing everything in her power to make sure that her desire for vengeance did not go unsatisfied. It filled him with indignation and fury.
But, when he checked those feelings, he saw something else. He felt something else.
She missed her charge. Deeply. Terribly.
If he allowed himself to feel it, it was nearly unbearable. He had to stop himself, more than once, from offering her help. From telling her that the Lightbreaker boy was still alive somewhere, exiled.
But he was not quite sure that the Lightbreaker was alive. Or that her fury would not stab through him with just as much pain as she had promised.
Vivi was a kind woman. Bucephalus knew that—he knew that from before Sertorius had died.
Sertorius…
He allowed himself to linger on the name and the memory. He allowed himself a moment, the briefest moment, to miss the stag. There had still been fear when Sertorius reigned, yes. There had still been death, and problems, and horrors, and hard winters and droughts and all the rest.
But there had not been this fear, or these deaths. There certainly had not been this strange feeling in the pit of his stomach.
Why, he allowed himself to wonder, did Adonis get to be so strong? When Sertorius reigned, Adonis was nearly nothing—a slip of a creature, slender and charming but without strength or stamina. The years, the sun, had been so kind to Adonis.
The deaths, too, if Bucephalus could admit it. Every death had been kind to Adonis. Where Bucephalus sunk with the weight of his herd’s death on his shoulders, Adonis seemed to glide into further favor with the light every time he was bereft.
… every time…
The Lightbreaker will come to pull us from our path...
“What do you do there, Bucephalus?” Adonis’s voice broke into his thoughts. Bucephalus turned his head abruptly, starting at the noise.
“What are you doing here?” he asked back.
Adonis took a gentle step into the light. The snow was beginning to fall in the preserve, and a hush fell over the forest. Adonis watched the fall of it for a moment.
“So bracing, isn’t it?” he mused. “This chill.”
He inclined his head at Bucephalus once more. “But I digress. You never answered my question. Where are you coming back from that you are away from your herd? I thought you had given up stalking the woman.”
“I am merely keeping tabs on her,” said the larger stag. “She is becoming dangerous.”
Adonis blinked slowly. “You are still keeping tabs on her?”
“I do not think,” said Bucephalus, “that we should continue alienating our former allies. It breeds paranoia. It divides our herd. There are some who still do not like what you did to Sertorius’ soul-son.”
Adonis flinched at the name. His eyes opened, a darkness splitting the fiery gold of his irises. “Whose?”
“Sertorius,” said Bucephalus again angrily, taking a step forward. “Sertorius.”
He took another step forward, lowering his golden antlers, the sharpened tips just barely inclined toward Adonis. “And who are you? What have you hidden from me, Adonis? Why do you brighten each time death falls upon us? Why have you been so obsessed with ridding us of a boy that did nothing to harm us? Tell me. Who is the Lightbreaker? There are two of you, aren’t there? Aren’t there?”
An arrow spun from the air and landed between them. Adonis’s fur was raised and his face was livid, his nostrils flared and his lips curled from his teeth. The light beneath his hide shone brightly against the snow, like a contained supernova. He snarled.
Bucephalus staggered back, looking up at the black form hidden in the trees. “You kept him alive,” he gasped, “for this, didn’t you?”
“I had hoped,” sneered Adonis, “that you would come to your senses, Bucephalus. You have been such an admirable beta to me. You did such a good job under Sertorius. I hoped you’d continue with me. But you are bent on offending me, aren’t you?”
He took a few slow steps forward. “Your Lightbreaker is dead. I left him rotting in a desert a thousand, thousand miles away. And if you want it to be your turn now, I am happy to do it.”
Adonis barked out a laugh. “Run to your herd, Bucephalus. Let me pick them off one by one. It’s time they see you die.”
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Posted: Fri Feb 17, 2017 8:10 am
The Calm
Seeing the preserve again was like visiting a dream. It was like crawling through a mirror and seeing everything in the world reversed and not-quite-right. He walked with his crutch like a walking stick, leaving impressions in the snow as they went: some strange, one-legged creature, drifting off trail and deep within the forest. The stag felt a calm he had not felt in months, but not one borne from true confidence or even solace—the calm when the knowledge that something is terribly wrong is accepted, the calm beyond anxiety, the calm beyond panic and fear. He felt, if he was honest with himself, as though he was breaking the law.
He was, in a way. He was breaking his exile.
Beside him, Hart was breathing quickly.
“I should leave you,” she whispered in the darkness. She did not hold his calm. “They may have already seen me.”
“It’s alright,” he said. He took his crutch—his faithful, precious crutch—and tapped it on the ground. All at once, the rough edges and knots in it straightened, and its edge sharpened into a point. The crutch turned, in a fraction of a time it had taken to first make it, into a spear.
He offered the tip of the spear to Hart. “They’ll come for me just the same, whether they know you’re here or not.”
“Something is the matter,” she said, shuddering. She put her thumb over the blade of the spear and slowly, deliberately, drew her flesh across it. Black blood bloomed over it, staining it. “I can feel it.”
He smiled gently at her. “Of course something’s the matter. I’m here again.”
Hart hesitated. She drew in a breath and then tried to speak, then swallowed her words and began again.
“You are Sertorius,” she said quietly. “You have the soul of the greatest stag who ever lived. You have the soul of him who was my knight, and the bravest one there ever was. Do you know that?”
His smile was small and enigmatic. He nodded a shallow nod.
“That’s you,” she said. “That’s you, Lightbreaker. The one who will liberate the stags, once and for all. Aren’t you?”
“I am,” he promised.
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Posted: Sat Feb 18, 2017 10:50 am
Alone
“I leave you here,” Hart whispered fretfully, in her doe form, and she leapt away in the snow to burrow and hide where she knew to. Cesc nodded after her but did not much react, although for the first time in weeks, his body knew: he was, for now, alone.
It was a strange sense of deja-vu.
The snow fell around him, the wind bit into him, but he did not flinch. He went through the woods, his mind clear.
He remembered the last time he had been here, the way his heart had pounded, the way his thread of his thoughts had tangled into knots. The desperation he’d felt.
That was all in the past. He felt none of it now. His head had cleared of both despair and horror. Those emotions had been scrubbed from him—seared by the desert sun into charcoal and then Hart, her beauty and her eager love and her equal disgust for him, had swept that all away.
Cesc was alone. And it felt strangely clean.
As he floated along, he saw markers of his previous self. There—that was where he’d darted off the path with Lorin in his arms. And here, here was where he’d seen the soaring arrows.
He paused by the memorial of antlers, the strange macabre vine of them between two evergreen trees, his eyes lingering on each one as he went. Were there more now than when Adonis had first shown him? He stopped as his eyes alighted on a smaller pair, a pair that glowed gold beneath the others.
His own.
Cesc’s mind called to reference Adonis’ face, his warm, damp breath on his face. The way he’d spoken then.
But even that memory did not stir him. He did not heave, did not panic. His breath was even and his mind remained clear.
He strode forward, beneath the deathly garland, and made his way to a clearing. The snow continued, unabated.
Here. Here, he would wait.
They would come to him.
Cesc heard their approach before he saw them. He breathed a slow and easy breath. He looked at the spear he held—the spear that was once a crutch, and before that, a pinion feather. He smiled gently at it.
“You and me,” he said, quiet. “Just you and me. Are you ready?”
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Posted: Sun Feb 19, 2017 2:14 pm
Stampede
The snowfall should have been the most silent the forest could ever be, but the animals tucked away into their holes and dens and nests could not sleep. There was a horrible sound in the preserve, a dull roar and a quaking that would not allow any to rest.
It was small but terrible: a stampede.
A herd of white stags, doe and fawn raced through the forest with a fear so electric, it burned all in its path. They ran, their legs up high, leaping over brush and creature alike.
Bucephalus ran.
It was cowardly, he thought angrily to himself, but it was the only way he could try to save some of his herd. The hunter would slay them all, whether Bucephalus was the first or last to go. And true enough, the hunter followed hard on their trail, with Adonis’s sharp and terrible laughter punctuating their run, far behind.
Arrows littered the air, but as of yet his herd had managed to dodge them.
Bucephalus kept one eye behind them and tried to account for all, his mind spinning.
Before them in the path, a flash of pink pulled his vision.
Shock strangled him as he ran, his eyes widening.
The Lightbreaker.
No—he wasn’t the lightbreaker, Sertorius’s reincarnation. Adonis was the true lightbreaker, the one who had stolen the light of so many of their dead brethren. The boy, that was the one he’d pinned his crimes on. The one they’d all thought was the true Lightbreaker, in the most literal sense. Even Sertorius had been taken in.
But what did it matter?
He was back. He’d regained his power. And he was no doubt there with their blood in mind.
Bucephalus couldn’t blame him. They had taken his pride, his antlers, his friend, his dignity. He would apologize if he could to the boy. But there was nothing for it. With the hunter and Adonis behind and the boy before him, Bucephalus must fight them all. It was no longer a matter of honor. It was a matter of life and death.
It would be all of their deaths, he thought grimly.
The prophecies were true. The lightbreaker had brought about their ends.
Bucephalus bent his head, brandishing his antlers. His herd split to let him go forward, to take the first joust. He exhaled hard through his nostrils and dove into a gallop, ready to defend his herd.
The stag Raevan raised his spear.
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Posted: Mon Feb 20, 2017 11:43 am
Showdown
The herd broke through the trees, and Cesc snapped his head up. The wind blew with them as though heralding their approach, and Cesc could see each member of the herd in their panic, their eyes all round and half-hypnotized by fear. They saw him and then slowed, parting—and there was Bucephalus, as tall and imposing as Cesc remembered him.
His antlers were down, gold and sharpened, ready to fight.
Cesc lifted his spear.
Above and behind the herd, in the trees, he saw him: a black figure in a red mask, two fingers releasing a threaded bow. An arrow screamed from it, rushing in the air for Bucephalus’ hide.
The massive stag and the arrow both approached, and Cesc decided. His wings beat once, he leapt into the air, and his spear cut through the wind.
The arrow splintered in half.
And Bucephalus passed beneath him, his speed and the wind pulling Cesc’s ribbon in a straight line snapped behind.
The large stag gave a strange and garbled noise, a roar aborted, his hooves dragging in the snow. His heard continued to stream forward, but they scattered, darting into the trees, hiding themselves. Bucephalus skidded to a stop and turned, his eyes wide. He swallowed, his nostrils flared, his eyes darting into the shadows for proof of some conspiracy.
The boy had purposefully missed him. Protected him.
“Lightbreaker!” He called into the air, his breath like smoke from his lips.
But Cesc saw none of it. He cared for none of it.
He’d found whom he’d wanted to find.
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