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The brass mirror on the wall is dull, reflects a face you can’t quite recognize, and have you always looked this way or have you become smaller, whittled down and folded by the gnarled hands of fear? Tonight, you are more mirage than manifest, and do you look the same as you did in the daylight, the same as when you met her, the same or sheerer, here but hardly, faint as gossamer, a ghost?
The stench of Bravil wafts in through the window, and for once it's a grounding presence that lets you know you haven’t yet dissolved. From the bed, she stirs, a strange tongue slithering through parted lips, and though the night has stolen the pigment from the room, she is the only thing not bathed in a bleary gray.
You don’t know how long you’ve been standing there, back pressed against the wall, palms clammy, the sweat gathering. “Come back to sleep,” she says, but the voice is not hers and the legs carrying you closer are not yours either. The air around you grows hazy. You must be dreaming. You must be dreaming, because though Masser’s glow bleeds upon the wall, it is a dust-mantled smear compared to this opaline light that spills freely from her every pore.
You wonder, do the foxes and nightjars that roam the darkside of the world think that death approaches in a blinding light? Does it come to them draped in gold, stretched like the fingers of the sun? Is it warm to the touch? Does it sear like a brand? Does it feel anything like this?
In a blink, you are beside her. You’ve taken hold of her. You are astride her, and she is not here but everywhere, bottomless and abyssal. Her mouth, her chest, everything a trapdoor. When you touch her, all you do is fall.
~.~.~.~
The smiling sun sees you as the moons of last night saw you, a desperate man turning circles in his own skin. And it’s still your skin, isn’t it? Is this still you? You touch the scar above your brow, the one your family carved while you dangled, bloodless, from the rafters. Still, the question writhes between your teeth. Hard to tell since you started avoiding the mirror, and when the name she calls you sounds less like Lucien everyday, you can’t help but wonder what else has begun to change.
In a blink, you’ve floated through the hours, the paperwork, the miasma of the town, blaming the sewer stench and the skooma smoke for the tangles of vanished time. Life in Bravil has found a way of beating you with its brutal banality, but it’s a triteness you can’t admit to. You, a pious servant. You, a man of faith, will find a way to cleave yourself from this malaise. After all, duty demands it. You were placed here, exalted, chosen by your God, and to doubt your position now is a sin as worthy of His Wrath as a broken tenet, for to doubt is to consider that you never held His greatness in you, that you were always going to doom them, that you’d been favored by mistake.
The burden is great, so great the Listener before you could not bear it, but you are a stronger man than he who will succeed where he had failed. Steeped in torchlight and the Niben’s brine, you bury your doubt as you bury your dead, and as you heed your Matron’s whispers, you pray she cannot hear them thrashing in the crypt six-feet beneath your feet.
You, a pious servant. You, a man of faith. If Sithis asks for blood, you'd let a pint and nothing less, and you will die in this position, bringing glory to His name. After all, apart from Him, you are nothing.
Then again, a part of Him, you are nothing still.
~.~.~.~
Frost Fall, the milky morning, the sun rising like a welt— you wake again into the nightmare, knowing today you’ll fail at being yourself because you did so yesterday, so too the day before. Lately, only the wetwork brings it back, that sense of youness, that splendor. With your dagger drawn, you are him again, and though you cannot recall his bearing, you measure his lust for life in decadence, in how swift he ends another’s. Always he appears, drawn by the blood, more faithful than your lover, and how is it that you can’t trap him before the thrill of the hunt fades? Or maybe you do, every time. Maybe you kill him in your bloodlust. Or maybe he isn’t you. Maybe he never was. Maybe you only wished to be made whole so badly that you cut open strangers, crawled inside.
Put the knife away. Pick up the quill. You will repeat this until it’s instinct. The covenant commands your hand as you write contracts you won’t complete.
Copy down. Count the coin. You send your Speakers off before you covet, but even alone, the longing unfurls its fronds in every new loop of the ink. Today, faith is not enough to stay the envy, and the thirst you learn in watching your assassins leave is coarse enough to efface all those you've known before. With every Speaker sent home, their pockets full, prepared to live the life you used to, the desire drinks up more of the sun until it shadows what sprouts beneath.
Sit, grip the quill, carry out Mother’s instruction. But you think of the dagger in its sheath, how dull it's grown in its disuse. Dare you admit that as Listener your edge grows blunted too?
Soothing truths you tell yourself— only the worthy bear His blessing. And yet it’s strange, how through success you’ve stumbled on a new flavor of disappointment. Is this a test? Abstain to prove your vigor. Walk the road mindless and arrow-straight. After all, it’s never been in your nature to question what cannot be controlled, and though the road has been kind, kind in the cruelest ways, better this than the converse. Even before Applewatch, you knew enough of death to know it's seldom peaceful. And yet it's strange, how only after you’ve crested the peak do you question how far the fall.
You take to the streets to clear your mind, and the sky above is pale, unbelievably blue, and endless. You imagine a sharp spade, digging a grave into it; up there, there is much more room.
Then suddenly you are plunged into shadow. An alleyway. It’s grimy gloom. How did you get here, to this side of Bravil? Whose feet carried you forward? In your hands is the neck of a man you’ve never seen before. You drop him, this stranger, this stranger like all the others, and the flotsam of his strangled cry bubbles up above the market din. If there is a plea, you cannot parcel it from the clatter, and in the shop window, you catch a passing glimpse of yourself— sunken cheeks, a mandibular look about you, gaunt and greedy as a locust. By what famine have you grown so lean?
And by what new virtue do you observe denial?
A swift swipe of the knife precedes the pleasure, fresh as fruit flesh. Hands still steeped in simmering blood, the thrill of the hunt fades faster than it did the last time. Was it always this way? You can’t say without doubt. If there was a you before, you remember little of who he was, only that all memory of him tastes of hunger.
~.~.~.~
Masser hangs heavy, ruddy like a drunkard's swollen cheeks, Secunda sickly at its side; it’s lousy light all the same. It sticks to your clothes, makes you too seen. There’s no mystery anymore, and these days you can never surprise her.
There she is, watching from the window, two dark eyes boring through the thinning veil that separates your blurring worlds, and with every new second, the boundary smears a little more. She holds a rabbit in her hands. Lately, she dresses her game right in the kitchen, fills the house with the smell of offal, a spritz of citrus above the iron tang. This, she does to taunt you, to say she knows where you have been.
“Hard at work or hardly working?” Her grin is sharper than her knife. The smile you indulge her with is a lie, and she reads it for what it is. With a roll of her eyes and a sullen huff, she busies herself, ignores you. It's one small victory amidst so much failure, but you eke it out wherever you can. They grow scarcer day by day.
The entrails come out in one pull, and the rip of tissue sings like silver. You imagine your body in her hands, her nails picking into you, hooked needles tearing out all the seams you've spent your life trying to keep stitched. Into the stew goes the butchered meat, a few bones, the heart. Barley and beets fresh from the garden. Wild garlic. Mustard greens. She offers you a glass of wine while it simmers, and you’re transported to a time before. Before Silencer. Before Cheydinhal. Before you knew anything of regret. When you decline the wine, it doesn’t stop her from drinking, and it sedates her just the way you like— with nightshade eyes, her pupils fuller than the moons. Only then do you risk approaching.
You didn’t think so upon meeting her, but she has a pretty face, more so in the dark. A strange geometry of hidden angles, ordinary when glimpsed from afar, but up close, this close, it lends her a serrated mien. Even when you soften your gaze and the candlelight flares, she bears the shape of something meant for drawing blood.
Bittersweet woodsmoke billows from the hearth. You imagine throwing her into it, leaping in afterward. Was it always this way? Close your eyes. Wish her gone. Which is worse, to watch the snake disappear around the corner or to never have seen it slithering at all?
When you preserved her amidst such treachery only to strip her of all else, should you have expected her to do the same to you in time? Yes, how gleefully you ravaged her only to be ruined in return, but it’s not her beauty you regret, not the lowly ways in which it tempted. It’s not the viciousness you’ve cultured; the venom existed before the fang. It’s the plans you made when you were still two different people, running from each other’s worlds or running to save them, when you didn’t think you’d make it this far, when the sacrifice felt worth it. When you were sure that by now one of you would be dead, what becomes of the need to fatally possess? You thought yourself better than this, smarter, and it’s not the surviving you regret. It’s that you can’t say with any certainty you wouldn’t do it all again.