you’re damned for being an evil thing and lauded for being a brave thing. you’ve got pearlescent teeth, weeping eyes, a mouth fit for a statue’s kiss and your wrists haven’t seen the light of day in years.

it is the morning of the fall of the moon, and when you climb out into the world for the first time in a century, you hiss, because she is too heavy in the sky and her light has kissed the paleness of your wrists. suddenly your veins are burnt with silver, your blood gilded with metallics and there is a vision of a pantheon before your eyes.

the pantheon is empty, but i think you knew that. no band of gods would let the moon leave the sky. she’s too important for that, too beautiful for that.

but it would not be better for her to be stained with blood. desperately and blindly you believe this, so you pull a little...

your hands are cold, why are you hands so cold? you think you’d be warm with all the anger inside you, think you’d be better off with some heat to you. 

there is a falling off a cliff edge, that you are watching on a loop. it takes six viewings to realise it is your own death you are seeing. this is of a strange comfort to you, a knowledge of what the end will be like. or, at least it would be if you were like everybody else. there’s a different end waiting for you. it’s coloured black and blue and glittering.

you try not to think about it when there’s another knife against your throat. it makes you panicky and then you breathe too fast, and when you breathe too fast your skin presses into the knife. go to your ending that is black and blue and glittering. ask it to kiss you better. then trace its wrist,...

she finds you in the empty movie theatre, the hazy one that’s left you stumbling more than once. 

“you can be more than a story locked away,” she says, face ghosting before yours like a moth pressed up against the inside of a lightbulb. there’s a shroud between these worlds, some barrier dividing the slurry of magic in hers from the fresh air of yours. you hum a pathetic note, something, (anything) to get her off your back. 

she always did turn to the heaven-scorched ones

“you could meet the end of the world and look it in the eye and smile”

you study her; the gossamer hair framing the sides of her face, the delicate way in which she flexes her hands as if trying to choke the air. you study her, and you say, “my hands are still scarred from that time i gripped the sword the wrong way around.”

you study her and you make up excuses...

you hate yourself in the back of this taxi? why do you hate yourself in the back of this taxi? it’s just a depressive episode again, shot up and silhouetted against the warm wetness of the asphalt, rain came too heavy and bore into all our heads, until we were gappy and useless. and you want to tear your own hair out in the back of this taxi, because your dad is cycling through his three trademark small talk topics again and you’ve never felt worse in your life, the light of the 7/11 blurring and this poison might have been something to do with the plane but! you want to bite down on your own arm till it’s bleeding in the back of this taxi! you want to hold your head out the window and scream at the world in the back of this taxi! 

you step out of the cab (the back of this taxi, whatever) onto an...

you’re walking along a derelict path, old war chants sounding in your head, when you stop at the edge of the darkened field.

it’s october, it’s bitter out, and the moon’s only a smudge in the sky. you shove your hands in your pockets and do your best to breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. you find a piece of plaster in the seam of your jacket. you pull it to pieces and wonder how it got there.

that wondering does not stop your chest from seizing up when you see the light switch on in among all the blackness. your head is too heavy for your shoulders now. you twist your fingers in supplication, trying to reach for the magic that’s been so absent ever since you arrived home. 

a goddess stands at the end of the barren wastes and you want to cry because hadn’t it been her body that you had left back at...

you are wearing two hoodies because it is fucking freezing in this place she calls home; with her asphodel wood guitar and the moonlight glare of the gravestones at her back.

and the names on the graves speak of war heroes and villains. high cheek boned people with a low tolerance for weakness but she is a beauty in the night. sings of sin and the sun and all those things we left behind in the city. and the lightning strikes off the side of your eyes, near-miss, track of your tears lit up with all those words we cannot bear to say in the dark.

and i think, all i’m trying to say is that the woods glow brighter with each passing day, and in the depths of them, i swear i see the profile of some ancient god.

She takes a look at your science notes, the messy ones that show how your mind is going a mile a minute and she gasps. It goes deep into her chest and you want to ask if she’s okay, but already her hands are clasped around your wrists.

“Tell me you dream of the stars,” she says, eyes alight with all those things she can’t quite reach because her mind has never wrapped around numbers and calculations the same way yours has. You take a deep breath; steady your chest so that it doesn’t fall apart on you.

“They’ve crossed my mind once or twice,” you whisper back because your teacher has an eye on the both of you, turned in to each other like sunflowers towards the sun.

The sigh she gives makes your heart constrict. “Well that’s just not enough, is it?” she’s saying, and the way she pulls away and picks her pen back up has you...

“Did I do all these terrible things to you?” Rory asks, staring at the mess of a timeline laid out before her. It twists itself up too much. How could one singular boy have lived through all of this? 

And Damon’s still writing, hand all a blur and the catch of his eye gone wild. She thinks she spots a tear but she’s not entirely sure.

“Am I thinking it up? Am I allowing you to cry right now?”

He stops. He puts his pen down. He turns to her and he breathes in deep, lungs expanding out and in; normal human, not full god, normal god, not full human.

“Do I think up these things, these terrible things, because they have already happened to you or do I think them up and then they happen to you?”

“I can never tell,” Damon says, his tongue flicking pink. “I’ve been trying to figure it out for years.”

“What would you...

it’s august and everything is steeped in heat,
warmth of your sleep, throat caught under a sunbeam and your tears watermelon wet, eyes got hot too quickly,
trip of lukewarm water against the skin of his cheek,
fingers caught on wood-rot fences, apple-drunk wasps, crunch of the yellowed bodies beneath pink feet, height of the sky above you and rolling in grass with a sad sided grin.

and sleek eyed gazes over golden wheat, heart stops for a beat, picks you up for two more.

She presses two heart-shaped stickers to your cheeks and for a moment you can’t breathe, but that’s okay because she’s having trouble with it too.

And it is lapses in judgement that leave you teetering on the edge. They call this place “World’s End” like that’s a bad thing. Like it’s not a place where you can come to forget that you’re just a reincarnation of everything else that’s ever mattered. Like it’s not a place where you can lie nearly face down on the grass so you don’t have to see the statues of the dead twins. Like it’s not a place where you can say sorry to the moon for all that’s happened to her.

Do make sure you stand behind her when the prophecies come again. You don’t know what it is but she’s always so faint at the end of it all. It leaves a faint staccato hum in your chest, the sway of her body...

place your palms against the curve of the earth and tell me how fast her heart beats.

do you remember the salt from the sea? wretched thing that you crawled yourself out of, gossamer wings dripping like drowned baby’s breath.

you sit yourself along the bath edge, harsh glow of the light against your brow and in the sink, your blood slips golden down the drain. against the milkiness of your leg, there is a head. hair brushes your calf, silky sound of their voice whining again.

“why must you have so many nosebleeds? do you have too much blood in that head of yours?” they ask. you nod once in answer and it’s like they hear the sloshing of it, the aborted whimsy in your temples, because they kiss the curve of your knee with whispery lips and shut up for the rest of the night.

hazy day, you laid out in the grass like this. on that wrist...

i am going to let myself be a summation of magic and colour//and i am going to let myself be dragged through the murk of the world//towards sweet apples and our faces paved across the sky//and i’m going to let myself run full tilt at my best friend//barreling into her like a hurricane and shrieking with this lightened life, this conduit for laughter//and i am going to think that it’s okay to get paper cuts as long as you don’t dip them in lemon juice//and that it’s okay to cry as long as you drink enough water afterwards//and that it’s okay to want to tear the earth down to her bones and to crawl inside them and draw different shapes on the inside of your eyelids as long as you dress her back up again in all the happiness that could have been//and fuck it’s okay to be sad and it’s okay to heal from the blue of it//the aching...

“the sun made a crown for you. he left it in that pocket of the universe you frequent.”

it’s a mess of a thing//molten magma, fire-lit stones//and you pick it up with burnt fingertips//arc of your wrist a reverent thing//glance of your bones infinitesimal//and it fits upon that head of yours perfectly//and sure it scorches the tips of your ears to bits//but it also keeps all the bad bits of your mind from spilling out//and the heat of it is good, for that hardened heart of yours.

“yeah, he decided you were too intense all the time, too up in arms. i think he needs you to thaw out a bit.”

“i-i didn’t know you could be born of both the rain and the sky.”

that’s the funny thing, isn’t it?//how there’s not a single picture to immortalize your child-round cheeks//chubby fingers, blue-born eyes//you burst into your teenage years and hold ten renaissances for yourself in the space of a month//why is it that the ground never feels enough for these feet of yours?//your heels chapped but strong//the twist of your ankles a maze for the ghosts//just, take a moment and breathe//the feeling of being meant for something more will pass in a moment.

you bend your head back towards the sky and send silent wishes towards the sun. “it is not that the rain doesn’t make a good mother, it is just that i’d rather be warm than dripping wet.”

and you step into this forest with mottled feet!

oh, how wonderful, the way the sky smiles at you with sun lead teeth and clouds for eyes!! how the ghosts leaning deadly on the flowers sigh at the sight of you!! you are moon blushed and shining, a thing stolen from the night and dropped flat in the middle of the day! and she welcomes you, the earth she does. your father came from her after all, with green-tipped fingers and flowers tucked in the hollow of his collarbones and she is kinder than the sea! she takes things by halves and she holds you and she loves you.

and then the day has fallen away to make room for this dragon, this great luminescent thing. “Star-shaker” and “Ye Olde Great One” and “The Guy You Go To When You Find Yourself Disillusioned with Life.” he sits on the moon, with his claws crossed primly and he hums at the...

the scalpel is shaky in your hands

first cut’s the worst//torn-up skin//robin-red blood//i remember how your voice sounded when you asked//heart line-sharp, holy lilt to your words//“just wanna see what makes them up, okay?”//and i lay back and watched the clouds//face tilted towards the bleeding sky//and through the wound//these teary-eyed confessions came out singing//gut-punched and bright//and it’s like i could talk more//about conduits and some cliched feeling of possession//but the earth’s a blur and my heart’s always been too good at beating

“how’d the sky look?”

he tilts your head up with ichor soaked fingers//taller than you, always will be//“i mean, how’d the sky look when you came falling down from it?”//ghost of a stammer and he pretends not to notice// you neck is cold, your hands shaky and the gasp of your breath is deafening //and it’s just like, you can imagine the arc of the flames//that brilliant streak of destruction left trailing across the sky//and he leaves gold stains underneath your chin//glitter trailing down the column of your throat//like the sun’s missing him so it just splashed a little bit of itself all over his palms//divine lifeblood, space rock clinging to shimmery skin//and you said you wouldn’t do this again//pick up damaged gods that have taken to wandering in the corn fields by your home//(gunmetal eyes, viridian veins,)//but it’s always like they just look so lost and so; you like to take their hands and point them skyward again.

option 1:

slip down the slate of your roof and laugh out into the night//you’ve got flushed knees and teary eyes//tarnished knuckles and a tangled up chest//this is okay and the moon smiles//headily, you are alive

option 2:

open your window and sing out into the night//you’ve got butterfly skin and warm hands//a glowing heart and hearth fire hair//this is okay and the moon smiles//softly, you are alive.

option 3:

lean over the cliff edge and shout out into the night//you’ve got chapped hands and blue lips//frost-bitten ribs and a voice full of resurrection//this is okay and the moon smiles//irrevocably, you are alive.

this is the place you should have grown into 

his mess of hair splayed against the couch//and the crackling of her eyes, tapering in the moonlight//it’s like your bones know where you call home//(the warmth of the grass beneath your feet and the smell of honey in the air,)//and sure, the sky has always split itself open for you//and the clouds have never not shuddered at your presence//but gilded edges do this thing were they fade//and it’s like; have you ever seen the corners of your hometown do that?

ignore the bitter aftertaste, it only lingers for a second 

and we could be all glossy with this//sweet things, the chemicals//fingernails bitten to the quick//and thin eyelids like match paper//you’ve heard of blue blood//and clockwork hearts//and it’s like they’re taunting you//you’ve been here before//won’t you breathe in the choking fog and remember?

“is this obsession?”

face tilted towards the sun//water lily petals in your hair//it’s easy to get lost in the heat of these days//the pastel flowers, the summer-scented leaves//things feel ghostly; bright-tinged and lighter//and you’ve been told that obsession feels dark//like midnight veins beneath wrists//and the bruising beneath eyes//but this feels like redemption//and you fall into it, open and wanting.

it’s like warm hands lead to good things

electric heaven with your startled fingers//seldom do the bad ones reach up so high// with frenetic eyes and worse lungs//copper and tin tongue//i promise that you’re only made up of the good things// dizzy feeling of finally getting what you’ve yearned for//they asked “what’s it like up there?”//and all you could do was smile.

and i think it would be nice:

to just sit in the garden//grass beneath your feet//that certain smell of something new in the air//the glittering of the wind chimes//tired eyes and loopy laughs//your knees are muddy again//sun on your back, quaint hat on your head//where does the stream go? is it somewhere unknowable?//and in the end, it’s like, you can’t have your childhood back//but maybe; this is enough.

can you hear me over the roar of the wind?

you’ve got bloodied elbows//dashed out eyes//that myriad of papercuts//the bright pink of flesh healing//has anybody ever heard you cry?//the choke of it and the sway of your shoulders//the hitched up breaths and the watered-down blue of your eyes//storms do not last forever, even if there’s no one around to hear them//let the thrum of the earth fill you up//let it shower you in kindness//and at the end of your rope, that precious frayed thing//there’s a new heartbeat//won’t you sit a while and listen?

you’ve never seen bones quite so pretty.

hyacinth-coloured bruises on your wrists//and chrysanthemums trailing through your rib cage//this is where your heart ends//and another begins//blackened veins//dreary eyes//that sickly sweet smell of the dead and the dying//hark! the ground calls for repentance and you shush it with cold hands//didn’t anybody ever tell you that the sun shines through translucent skin?//you’ve decayed into one of us//and the goddess, she mourns.

you’ve missed the light.

you’re worried that it won’t quite catch on these arid corners of yours//and you said you’d be better for it//bruised knuckles and hopeful fingers reaching for the sun//and the sky mourns what you’ve lost in the dark//your heart and your smile, your soft edges and your teary eyes//and this maybe enough//this shell of you, this carapace, this holy and shattered thing, it may be enough//to sit and drink in this encroaching dawn//and everything is not okay, not in the slightest, not even in those fevered dreams of yours//but the sky, it’s a homage to all the best parts of you//and stubbornly, it lightens.

It is possible, and not an entirely insane thing to think, that you’ve always fallen a little bit more into the wind than everyone else.

Your mother tells you to come in from the field, to stop standing on the fences and disturbing the apple trees. She doesn’t understand that the curve of your eyes hide secrets and that the dirt of your palms belies divinity. You wander into the stone of the house and you take to sitting on the counter tops. She only pulls you down once you start kicking the cabinets.

~~~~

A friend has their head across your lap and rather than them staring towards the sky and wishing; they are asleep. Shamelessly, you yearn to have such peace and the shallow heave of their chest gets the space behind your eyes all hot. The grass prickles beneath your legs and your other friend, the more magically inclined one, worries after you and your tepid skull...

“i am sad a lot of the time.”

You hold the sword up above your head. All it does is drip blood into your eyes.

“the world is too big for us!”

The sea wind snakes its way through your hair. Something alights in your heart. 

“there’s a drawing of you in this book but they got the colour of your eyes wrong.”

The waves crash against the rocks and oh god, that does sound like a funeral dirge, doesn’t it?

“heavens help us! why is the sky so far away?”

The clouds have started to weep. A fracture appears on the horizon.

“d’you think even the divine are happy?”

Terrible things are not always the end though. You wipe the blood from your face. 

“i think that the wind chimes should be our anthem!”

Whispers of brighter days wrap themselves around your wrist. 

“prophecies are horrid things and we should stamp them to death.”

You...

Oran’s asleep on the couch.

He’s got his head tipped back over the edge of it and his mouth is hanging wide open and he snores and Accalia thinks to herself that he really is quite infuriating but he’s also perfect and he’s also wonderful and the quiet look of melancholy on Neiryn’s face only shows her that he’s thinking the exact same thing. She smiles gently at the both of them (her fatalistic boys,) and grabs the box of artifacts off the table.

“Ackerley!” She calls down one of the hallways and there’s a series of resounding crashes before he’s running full speed at her, all bright teeth and wild limbs. He slides the last length of the hall in his socks and his elbows do hurt when they bash into her but then he is saying:

“Yes, my dear?” And Accalia is beaming at him.

“Do you want to help me grind these god hearts to pieces?”

For...

The difference between dawn and dusk is that one is always screaming at you to remember and all the other one can say is “please don’t go,” and it tears you to pieces. You are scattered to the wind and you are aching.

The difference between dawn and dusk is that one lets you be a free child, a feral thing with strawberry juice colouring your mouth and grass stains on your knees and suddenly it hurts the sky to see you so full, it hurts the sky to see you laugh. The other one just has you lying in a waterlogged field, your tear stained face pointed towards the heavens and really, it’d be a universally awful thing for you to just stay here but nobody knows this place and even fewer people know your name.

Even fewer people know your name.

The difference between dawn and dusk is that either your fingertips bruise when you reach for the...

The sun is pulsing in the sky.

It looks like its beckoning him outwards, away from the palace. Asmund scoffs at it, and then his chest lurches because it is a pathetic and desperate sound that he makes.  He’s determined to be at least a little bit difficult about this though. Serepthys would just have to wait a bit longer.

“You are not bigger than any of the rest of them!” the sun god bellows and Asmund’s heart beats feverishly in his chest. “They are your equals! They do not deserve your disdain!”

Acutely, he becomes aware of how cold his crown is against his head. It is bitter in his fingers as he takes it off. Destan had never really liked how constantly he had worn it anyway. That didn’t stop the boy from flinching when Asmund threw it at a wall. 

“You cannot slay a dragon and keep a crown on your head all at the same time!”...

So 2019 has ended. I don’t know who gave it permission to go and do that, but here we are; standing all bright eyed at the brink of a new decade. I have this certain sort of excitement in my stomach at the thought of it. Which, maybe, is a little bit idealistic and of course, we only decided to make sense of  time just so we could have some relative idea of where we are in the world, but it’s hard not to get excited by the start of something new. And so, a lot of us are goal settings. Which I think is fantastic.
 
As of late, I’ve been scheming away in this little head of mine and I’ve chanced upon two goals that I’ve decided to set for myself for this year.
 
So, —just in an attempt to set the scene— in  2019 I finished writing the first draft of my book.  It’s terrible and...

Some rules:

• ​Do not ask the dream characters where there eyes are.

Last time you did this, a shadow settled itself over your honey-coloured vision. The bystanders, they put on masks. The sky; it split open from the force of their malevolence.

• Remember that most gods have permission to die by the side of country roads.

It’s hard to look, no? The golden blood veining out across the ground. The harsh breathing and the unholy twirl of their wrists. Do not clip their wings; the afterlife has too many cliffs to jump off.

• You’ve got to remember that this may feel like heartache now, but these are the seeds of vengeance. They’ll hurt as first, as the sprouts burst from your skin, but soon they’ll lead you to the peak of that mountain.

”The mountain air is wildly sweet,” you murmur to yourself through wind-chapped lips. “It’s like a trap.” The moon rises luridly from below you. You take a breath...

 

• This one has always been something that’s hounded me, so: glory or wisdom?
• If offered immortality, would you take it? To be more specific, this bored sort of deity has offered you complete immortality, and as such,  it’s all or nothing. Either you take it and stay around for all that silence (I actually do not know if it would be silent, please leave me be,) when the universe dies out or you go through your normal biological process. Before you think of all the existential dread that that prospect offers you, think of all the skills you could master, the people you could meet and how much of the universe you’d be able to explore. Think of what you could achieve. 
• What pantheon of gods is your favourite? Could you tell me why?  For example, I’d go with the Greeks and it’s purely for the aesthetic and the idealization of the heroes. They’re fun to write about. 
• Who’s...

Hey! I know this is sort of out of the ordinary for me but I’ve got no worthwhile writing to post and I just wanted to check in and say a few things while I’m at it.

First off, I’m thinking of starting a series here? You know “Adoni: A Study Of Fire”? Well, she’s got a bunch of other characters that relate to her story so I’m thinking of doing kind of the same thing with all of them. I’ve got Destan’s started (his will be based on water and like,,, other things) but he’s proving to be extremely tricky and somewhat long, so, it may be a two parter and it may not be out for like, a long while.

It’s funny because now that I have sat down to write this I’ve completely forgotten everything I want to say. Guess I’ll just talk about NaNoWriMo.

Uh, NaNo really kicked my ass, lol. I got about 20,000 words...

Some rules:

• ​Do not ask the dream characters where there eyes are.

Last time you did this, a shadow settled itself over your honey-coloured vision. The bystanders, they put on masks. The sky; it split open from the force of their malevolence.

• Remember that most gods have permission to die by the side of country roads.

It’s hard to look, no? The golden blood veining out across the ground. The harsh breathing and the unholy twirl of their wrists. Do not clip their wings; the afterlife has too many cliffs to jump off.

• You’ve got to remember that this may feel like heartache now, but these are the seeds of vengeance. They’ll hurt as first, as the sprouts burst from your skin, but soon they’ll lead you to the peak of that mountain.

”The mountain air is wildly sweet,” you murmur to yourself through wind-chapped lips. “It’s like a trap.” The moon rises luridly from below you. You take a breath...

Okay, so you’re in the monastery and the ghosts are visiting too much again.

He, the godling, is immortalised in the stained glass and the curve of his cheek lets you think of a million and one different things. He looks up at his sister, a sharp smile melding his features into colour. The clouds around him are grey, but is that streaks of green in his hair?

It’s been five years. It’s been five years and you’ve gone half mad; how are you meant to know? Maybe you should remember his face, the plain of his shoulders and the lilt of his hips but the dead scream at you. O’ Goddess (stained glass beauty) how wretched are they? To subject you to this? How wretched are you? 

When it rains, the glass cries for you.  His face screws up and his eyes spill, all pretty and undamaged and he may have been the god of this land but he...

Okay, so he laughs and it’s absolutely filled with reverence and excitement and fear and then out of his mouth next is a jumble of incomprehensible words and they’re all so sharp and exuberant to the point where you wonder; how is he not bloodied by them yet? 

“There’s just so much out there!” He exclaims and gold lightning cracks across the sky like a warning, the ground heats up like a reckoning and the planet rings, oh how they spin. Everything is outlined in this precious hue that I have stored in my pocket for centuries and when did the interstellar folk return? When did their wings take to tickling our grass again and why does the world smell round and smooth and like a stepping stone for every worthwhile adventure you could ever have?

Death feels small and far away when he tips his head back. I glance at the column of his throat and feel invincible. The...

Oran stumbles on to the stage with a pyre of shadows lit in his stomach.

His hair is stuck to his head with sweat and he smiles at the crowd. His eyes flash with all the glints of the knife he’s seen in the dark. A revolution tumbles from his lips.

He speaks into the microphone and the world flares bright purple.

“What hurts most?”

“The evil air, the breath of the dying, the last leaf trampled on the ground, the boundary between wildness and civility, your last glimpse of dawn, the oppressiveness of the twilight, the kindling still hot enough to burn and the flowers that never made it because they were too fragile.” 

He fists his hands in my shirt and my breath catches. “What hurts most is the end of autumn and the start of a new night, the last page in a book slices my fingers to shreds and the first frame of a movie stops me from breathing for all of two hours. Pixels die and fade and magic leaks from us because we were never strong enough to make it our own. Clouds pass by and the grass plains flood, the sand stings your eyes and your heart stops beating but not before it shouts and screams at the sky for more time and more memories.”
...

So it’s like this;

Adoni comes into the world with starburst skin and burgundy hair. She’s swaddled in cloth and covered in kisses and laid gently down to sleep but sparks of fire catch in her eyelashes and if you listen closely you can hear her hair crackling.

It’s passed off as a blessing from the gods. After all, that great big mountain is so close and it does look like a home that Vulcan would make for himself. Marble heats where she touches it and people clap in awe for the first few years. And then for the next few, they whisper of hubris and maybe they’re right because Adoni knows she is meant for something more. She’s not meant for running a household while being swallowed by a white sheet. She’s meant for the heat from the earth, and for blanched leather boots and for dragon teeth. Her head aches with visions of majesty and liquid gold. She...

“You’re all sharp angles and hate, aren’t you?” Neiryn spat and I felt something roil in my stomach because he sounded a little more venomous than usual. A little too exhausted to be anything less than sincere.

“I mean, you’ve got this look to you. Always a bit wild around the edges, eyebrows furrowed and mouth twisted up into something sharp.”

I touch my hand to my lips distractedly and listen on as Neiryn throws himself bonelessly into a chair and sighs

“Your eyes, it’s so often that they’re cold.” He rubs his temples. “The silver against the black? They look like frozen stars, ready to explode and take the world with them.”

Maybe he’s right, stars always were his forte.

He turns to stare at me and the look on his face, it’s pain. “And gods above us, Oran,” his voice has lost some of it’s heat, “the sight of you? So much of your wraithery seems to disregard...

My father was not a good man,
His teeth were sharp and his skin gleamed bone-white.
I once held a hand to his cheek and it came back frost bitten, 

My mother was a good woman.
Her laughter tinkled, clear as a bell and her teeth fit all nicely together, never too many for her mouth.
I once held a hand to her cheek and her tears stained it silver.
So, now I have a cold silver and a warm silver, 
One for each hand.

My brother was not a happy boy.
The space between his ribs, it was never enough
 And so, the star our father trapped in there died, like a whisper on the wind.
I once pressed my cheek to his and soaked up some of his thoughts.
He did not stain me in any way, he was always too ghostly for that,
A perfect example of the impermanence.

My sister was a happy girl.
Took after our...

There’s summation of things that I find wonderful and electric and it’s always been the idea of heroes shrouded in glory and god touched hands tracing the landscape.

It’s always going to be bigger than myself and I think that’s why if I try to write about some normalcy, someone swimming in a lake with a friend, someone planting flowers, it devolves into talk of the stars, of reincarnation and different shades of gold.

Maybe it’s just that I am suffocated by how small I am and how utterly massive the whole universe is and I can breathe again when I try to scrabble at the palms of divinity.

I’m surprised I haven’t completely locked myself inside my own head yet.

If you were to unexpectedly find yourself in Aurelion for the first time, the first thing you would notice is that you feel a little heavier.

That’s the magic. It clings to ForeTolds like a second skin, makes a new home for itself across their bodies and they welcome it with starry-edged smiles. Prophecy children.  They glow softly as they race through Cyroknia’s twisted streets. The world, it highlights them in vibrancy. The winds smooths its fingers  fleetingly against their faces, the invisible hands at their backs, a guide to something better. Aurelion sees the magic settling and she beams with pride, going about her way to make the land worthy of their time. Each breath they take purifies the air. It gets harder to see the cracked stone and angry weeds in their peripheral vision. They stare at the rainbow moon and it stares right back. They use up some of Aurelion’s time and she makes more. 

“Anything for...

You’ve wandered into a dream that’s not your own.

I understand, it’s not your fault. Not all of the world’s hardships are and you’re still trying to get a handle on that new power of yours. It’s okay, I don’t blame you.

But you’ve wandered into a far off dream and you can’t tell if it’s a nightmare or not. The sun streams through the leaves, washing the world in gold but it also passes across old bones, bleached ones. Are they an animal’s? The hope that flickers in your chest is endearing. Almost so in that I want to run my hands through your hair. You press on before I can, a world unfurling at the sound of your footsteps.

The trees move to accommodate you and you pretend not to see. Your chest swells each time you take a breath. The world wants you heavy, wants you unable to fly away. I’d tell you to stop breathing but...

It’s hard to get used to. The starkness of the red against white marble, the slickness of it dripping down the steps of the altar.

My stomach roils and Hera wraps a hand around my neck, squeezing there like a threat and whispering how this is necessary and how this should make me happy. I try my hardest not to cry. Gods don’t cry, no matter their age.

It’s sort of sick though, no? That I am to be the god of all things soft and small and yet humans still find it prudent to slaughter lambs for me.

“Watch this,” he says with a spit-fire grin as he leaps from one stained rock to another. I feel the nostalgia bubble up in my chest, like a wave of grief and I almost stumble to the ground with what flashes before my eyes. It’s her, it’s my mother with her dark flyaway hair and rainbow gilded voice. I am of the mind that I can once again feel her fingers trace across my cheek, stopping tears before they can drip off my chin, but then I snap back to myself, like a rope pulled taut and she’s gone. The wind takes her place, a cold stand in. I shiver and he laughs again, a brightened chest and an arched foot.

Long ago, I decided that his eyes were, indeed, clocks. Only one of them tells the correct time but I could never settle on which. Sometimes we cross time zones and he shudders, a blanket of wrong settling on...

Your eyes hurt because the light of the new world hits them differently. Your mouth, it tastes like dawn and yet your teeth scream of blood and war and massacre all because they are pointed at the tips.

Your lips glow blue with the start of every ice age and when they thaw I can still see their redness behind my closed eyes. Your skin, it gleams, like every creature born in that damned pit teetering on the edge of time. I take your hand in mine and I grit my own teeth and I stick it out because you are so so beautiful with your hair like that, fisted in the breath of clouds. I kiss your cheek and bruise my lips on the marble they used to sculpt you but I’ve long since decided a few bruises are worth it. They are unavoidably worth it when you love a person who would sing to the moon more often...

“You found a god on one of the backroads?”

He nodded sharply, hands clasped behind his back and eyes cast towards the ground. “Yeah,” he whispered, “said they knew what the end of the world tasted like.”

“Well, what does it taste like?”

“Uh, like sugar? Only a little burnt.”

I laughed, a high brittle sound. He screwed up his face as he heard it and I didn’t fault him for it. It was probably like broken glass against the ears. “So, the apocalypse tastes like caramel then.”

“Burnt caramel.”

“Yup.” I sat down for a moment in one of those horrible oak chairs, “so, where are they now?”

“Oh, they sort of bled out. By the side of the road.”

My mouth made a little O shape in surprise. “Is that so? Cast out then?”

He rubbed at one of his hands and I watched as gold flakes fell idly to the ground. “Stab wounds and a broken...

I don’t know, okay? 

Maybe I’ve spent too long wanting to be held in a cherry red mist, with those god touched silhouettes at my back and a river scarring it’s way through my soul.

Maybe I’ve spent too long with my fingers itching to hold my palm against Atlas’ face, to take a little of the weight of the heavens from across his shoulders and drape it over me like some semblance of a new beginning for the damned.

Or maybe, just maybe, I’ve spent too long gliding my hands across paper and across marble, cutting my feet on sharpened glory as I watch the sun curl its way into the sky because it’s still so certain that down below on earth, gods walk the land and they’re aching for something new.

I never really thought my death would be a group effort.

A group effort, not in the way that there was some larger than life assassination plot; my injuries were born in stone and that is where they’ll stay, but rather more in the fact that I died with others. Dancing on the edge of immortality until a bright blue hand of fate coaxed us over to the forgetful side, the side where the flowers bloom only to wither again. Although, I have this nagging feeling that it was rather relaxed in it’s shoving and I’ve fallen somewhere between dawn and dusk. 

We are not withering but we’re not growing to the point where we can embrace the sky. There’s no hot blood flowing, but it hasn’t been drained either. We’re stuck in a standstill and I’d complain and call it limbo only that the glares of my unfortunate companions glue my mouth shut.

And so, maybe I am stagnating...

“Die under a fiery sky for me.” He says, swishing the candle through the air from where we lay on the marble.

“Hmm?” I mumble and my words are so sleep addled and my brain like some sort of syrup because the night is so sweet and warm, much like the lilt of his voice.

“Don’t die all milky & white in a field of flowers because you tried to run.” He says all matter of factly, like we are not, in fact, discussing the conditions in which I should strive to find myself deceased in. He sets the candle between us and I force myself to lie on my side only as to stare through the flame at him. He’s always ethereal while bathed in light. Something about the sheen of his skin.

“You’d still think I’d run? After all the fires we’ve walked through?”

He shrugs, “could you look me in the eye and say you wouldn’t leave...

“I’m sick of all these prophecies Rivin,” Adoni said and she slowed her strokes on the dragons head to look at him. “I’m just waiting for you to disappear.”

Rivin laid a hand on the dragon’s snout, its breath was starting to slow now. Getting lethargic and tired like the gold that still oozed from its wound. He refused to look at Adoni out of fear that he might cry if he did. “I don’t think you’re supposed to say stuff like that,”  he said softly, “it may anger some of the older gods.”

“Let them be angry. They’re not the ones being told they have an expiry date.” Adoni seethed beside him and now seeing that she was no longer able to be talked to, Rivin was content to just sit and watch and feel. Soak up all these worldly experiences.

The dragon’s tail curled tight around where they were both sat on the grass and the moonlight glancing...

It was usually quite hard to remember a picture only so he could paint it later.

But there was something about Adoni right now, a dragon dying in her arms in the middle of a forest, no sound but her slow whispers in its ear.  The moon shone in through the leaves showing a special affinity for the dying beast’s scales and light refracted across her cheek. A cut of iridescence next to her eye, a shot in the dark.

Rivin curled his hand around the tree trunk and didn’t come in to sit beside her. It would be awful to intrude on something such as this, so he was content to just stand and memorize. Memorize the tail curling around Adoni’s body and the way her grief seemed to be stooping her over, making her curve herself over the dragon as if that could somehow protect it from the open stab wound in its stomach.

He also made a...

He sits carefully on his knees beside me and tips my head towards him. He smooths his thumb slowly across my brow bone.

“You okay?” He murmurs, watching the movement of his own hand and I lean the side of my face into his palm like some sort of needy animal. His lip is bleeding scarlet red and I can feel the bruise forming around my eye, like some sort of stupid flower except it was given to me from a fist and I hope it never blooms.

I shook my head slightly as to not disturb the feel of his hand against my cheek and he sighs.  “None of us are,” I mumble, “and you know it.”

He hums a little bit and I imagine again it’s just so that he can block out my words. The tune is sweet, coated with some sort of untouchable grief and it’s soft blue behind my eyes. My other hand searches for...

“Help me up you bastard.”

He was floundering, like he actually was injured in some way but I put it down to dramatics and laughed. “But, like, you fell down the side of a mountain and I don’t particularly like helping stupid people.”

He wiped his hair viciously back from his face and made an odd snarling noise in his throat that I could hear from even up here. “You’d like to see me get eaten, wouldn’t you?” He fisted one pale bruised looking hand in the dirt and pushed himself up with no small amount of effort.

I considered that; how I would feel if he were to get eaten and when he saw me scrunching up my face in indecision he shouted wordlessly in frustration and flung a stone at me. I didn’t even duck backwards to avoid it, his aim was terrible.

“I wouldn’t wholly object to the idea of you getting wolfed down by some dragon.”...

“Your hands are soaked in blood again.” I said.

There was this awful wet squelching sound and I heard droplets hitting the ground. “What would you know?” He sneered, “you haven’t even looked up since I came in here.”

It was true, I didn’t bother to bring my gaze up from what I’d been reading. I knew what I would find; his face covered in dirt, blood up half the length of his forearms, as if he’d been washing clothes in the stuff. Sometimes there’d be a streak of gold running from his nose. Liquid immortality among the redness of those who did nothing more than die.

It contrasted in this lovely way, where suddenly you couldn’t tell the difference between stars and dirt anymore.

You’ve got your hands thrust into white banks again and they’re searching for the body of a cold boy. You’ve got your snowflakes tipped across your steaming hot skin and they don’t dare to melt, if only because it’s you.

The cut of your jaw gives you an audience as your skin glimmers in that ‘oh-I-used-to-be-cold-for-one-person’ type of way and your body remembers your time within the dark clouds, you fall apart in little flakes and build yourself up in drifts but you’re so damn warm, and you’re still not melting, you still refuse to melt.

You’ve got an icicle hanging from every finger and your hair is the colour of old slush. You used to have talons & hair the colour of something fresh & pure but you still haven’t found his body, oh god where could his body be?

Smoke keeps billowing from your nostrils and it’s lovely, juxtaposed all nice against the sharpness of your blue eyes,...

I am going to go to sleep and dream about legends and their bright white colours with the gold streaking through Icarus and the deepest of purple running down Hyacinthus, like water because I bet you, he bruised that colour when the discus hit him, thrown from that golden hand, and there is so much gold, so much fucking gold.

Let your head catch fire with the swirls of a warrior in smoke. Catch them and feel their roughed up skin, their scarred and scratched canvas and then move your hands to Achilles. Feel his skin, feel how it’s cold from the river but so smooth. So smooth, because his mother nearly drowned him just so his breath could be snuffed out in the sea of his own rage later. 

Stop grabbing at that marble, it’s been around for so much longer than you, and you may be a god, but you are young yet. Your heart has barely begun...

“My sun-swept boy” I whispered through chapped lips. I grabbed his face in between my hands and looked in his eyes. They were so tired. I think all of our eyes were tired now. Tired and broken and so beautifully done.

“Oran...” he wouldn’t look at me, he cast his eyes towards the ground and my gut clenched. There wasn’t a single spark there. He didn’t even try to push me away. I stroked my thumb over the sharp arc of his cheekbone, my eyes following the movement. He had cut his hair short. His curls didn’t flop out the sides of his helmet anymore.

“My gold tinted boy.” I murmured, breathe ghosting across his cheek, he looked over to the side of us, presumably to see if there was anyone around to see this. To see me, being so tender with the boy who nearly lost us everything. 

Outsiders liked to give the people they send to die...

The glowing eyes with their glowing pride and their dull love is wholly inconceivable and a little bit sharp at the edges and round everywhere else and it tastes like stone in your mouth but it feels like awakening? Like a feather stuck to the edge of your consciousness, a soft reminder wrapped up in the haze of your dreams.

You’d race a planet to the end of it’s days for a hug from the sky and you would scream at a god again, in that inexorable way of yours and you would tear this fabric of a life to the ground if it only meant he stood again, and he made the whole world smell like the copper of his skin and the winter of his mouth and hair again.

A star inside your ribcage and the light reaches through the slats of your bones like it’s trying to escape from the pitiful cage that is you. You’ve tied...

“Oh and as I lay dying on the ground, would you smile?”

I spit the blood pooling in my mouth at his feet. “I would absolutely fucking grin, my dear.”

Five bright shadows are walking towards the end of the world and this girl behind them; she grabs her mouth before this laugh of a sob can come out and says,

“They’re going home.”

And the shadows, they all link hands and suddenly, they’re wherever ‘home’ is.

He threw his head back over the couch and laughed lightly, “we’re all just water colour people with washed out smiles, are we not?”

“We’re embroidery thread hair and white garden stone  teeth and if we’re lucky we get eyes from the rocks in the sea, weathered by waves and coloured by some higher power on a whim.”

He yawned, stretching out his back and curling up comfortably like a cat on the seat. “We’re like a child’s art project,” he whispered, “a child who didn’t know what they were doing only that they were having an awful lot of fun.”

“I bet you your personality was chosen by a wheel of fortune and if you looked underneath the skin of your arms you’d see twigs.”

And after his proclamation he slept, the strings wrapping his wrists a little less taut than before 

“You’ve got pieces of paper in a jar there.”
Yeah, once I watched as a guy screamed his heart out on a stage and then hit a drum making them fall from the sky.
I picked them up off the ground.
One of them dissolved on my friend’s cheek, 
Her tears were happy but the paper didn’t care, it stuck, stuck so fast and I laugh sobbed a little more with her as some people moved around us.

I remember feeling every drum beat right in my chest and god, my feet were killing me, and my throat was getting scratchy with my own desperate shouts but he was right there, breathing and there was tears drying against my cheeks and the lights were almost too much for my eyes, but then he walked across that bridge, you know?
“No, I don’t”
Hey, that’s okay. You’ve probably felt this with other things though, that swell of light in your chest,...

“Oh my god, that’s it,” Accalia roughly drew her hair up behind her ears, “you don’t walk like us.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, you’ve still got that bounce of immortality in your step, the curled toes and strong footfalls. You’re walking towards an end I’ll never get to see.” She stopped and took a breath, eyes alight with an emotion her words didn’t reflect. 

“I’d been trying to figure it out for ages, there was just something a little bit off about you that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I went through a list of what I remembered when I first met you and saw that you had turned off the faint sheen of your skin, got rid of the too-sharp points on the end of your teeth and made your hair a little darker so people’s eyes wouldn’t hurt when they looked at it,”

“But Neiryn, that’s not how humans walk.”

His fingers were slack, two hands that had given up, attached to a body that didn’t know what it was doing anymore.

And her hair was the colour of the rainwater you hear about in hopeful poems 

And his lips, they gushed red, first with his words, second with a smirk and finally with the blood he found himself choking on.

And oh, he looked as if he stood nearly alone, in a forest that had burned down around him, who reached out to the screaming nature as she fell.

And beside him was a girl with a heart like flames licking up a rose and toes curling in ashes like she’d finally be pleased.

Last week they’d been called a group of insufferable children and here they were no longer shining, but dull, with bodies just a little too divine and cold for the ground to keep

His fingers were slack, two hands that had given up, attached to a body that didn’t know what it was doing anymore.

And her hair was the colour of the rainwater you hear about in hopeful poems 

And his lips, they gushed red, first with his words, second with a smirk and finally with the blood he found himself choking on.

And oh, he looked as if he stood nearly alone, in a forest that had burned down around him, who reached out to the screaming nature as she fell.

And beside him was a girl with a heart like flames licking up a rose and toes curling in ashes like she’d finally be pleased.

I am falling into
The summer heavy scent of your hair
The darkness of your pomegranate lips
And your wrist so delicate as to perch butterflies upon,

I am melting into
Your star bright skin
Your moon scourge eyes
And your ghostly fingers across my tatters

I am mixing with
Your lines of history
Your sun soaked voice
And your diamond teeth

I’m drowning out
Your sharp silver made scars,
Your black flower bruises,
And your gold tinted blood,

And when you were 14 these things came crawling towards you in the dark and you weren’t scared because they told you it would be alright. Because they lifted some of the hurt away and they trailed cold fingers across the parts of you that were burning too hot.

Oran

~~~~

And when you were 6 years old the sun didn’t stream through your fingers anymore, it caught in the palm of your hand and it stayed there because it thought you were warm and it wriggled a bit but that was okay because you finally had it, clutched in a small hand and it was yours to keep.

Neiryn

~~~~

And when you were 8 years old a small vine curled up and around your hand, clinging to you and your breath caught in your throat because it’s leaf tickled you and the skin where it had lain was left a pale green. And you stayed and watched as...

His face was twisted, tears leaking out of screwed up eyes. “But I’m not a fighter, please, I can’t do it anymore.”

I sighed, not wanting to deal with this again. My eyes travelled down his arms, that hung loosely at his side and I nodded at them. “Why is the blood that drips from your hands not your own then?”

His sobs rang louder.

//i think neiryn has had enough\\

You burst out of a star when you were born and you expect me to believe you’re just like us?

You fell from the sky. 
You’re divinity incarnate

And your footprints glow with the traces of your godly blood.

You saw yourself for the first time,
With ivy creeping up your skin,
And moss in the crevices of your(?) armour,
And if your mother saw the statue she’d say to stop being ridiculous
Because “you don’t look like that! Your eyes are much too round.”
And you’ve never seen another face in the corner of your dreams,
But someone answered a question in class the other day
“Who upset Achilles so much when they died Zeus had to intervene?”
And their words were like awakening because they opened their mouth and out spilled your name.

“Patroclus” Patroclus, Patroclus, Patroclus

“I have gotten lost in the time where we are only stone my dear.”



“Ah, at least we’re immortal. That’s  all we ever wanted, right?”

“We deserve something soft Neiryn. A soft ending. Don’t you think?”

His accent is thick right now. Hitting all his words and I can see he’s feeling an awful lot more than he usually allows himself to. His knees are pulled up to his chest and he looks small and tired. His eyes dart around the room because sometimes reflexes are the only thing keeping us alive. He lifts his head to rest it on his knees.

“We’ve had a lot of hardness, haven’t we? Gritty lines and sharp corners. I wish someone would smoothen things out for once.” He lifts a hand that was previously clutched around his shins and flexes his fingers, staring at them. “Somewhere where we’re allowed to cry for a bit would be nice. Let’s make sure the next ones are allowed to cry.”

“Let’s not have to have them smother down the healthy things. Let’s make sure the world gives them slight touches when...

There’s a boy falling down an elevator shaft and every 10 seconds there is hands trying to grab at him.
 
The hands are blue with the cold and if they grasped him they’d clutch around his heart and rip it out in a celebration because they go on believing what the darkness between the stars told them, they go on believing he stole this heart.
 
Please, listen to me though. He’s never stolen a thing in his life, that’s his in his chest and the hands must not have it, okay? The hands and their coldness that they brought upon themselves, they’ll turn him to ice. And gods that become frozen and heartless are always the first to drown galaxies.
 
~~~~
 
There’s a girl with hair the colour of the moon. She’s tipped her head back into something graceful. There’s the sharp curve of her chin and there is stars studded across her brow, adorning her and making her something more than space dust. Her hands are purple and...

I screamed at the sky when you said you’d go to Troy. I asked the divines, “why?” And one stepped out of the sky to watch me choke in my grief for you.
 
“You know why.” The love born girl whispered as she wiped away a stray tear. I watched as you and I, the entirety of us flashed across her eyes and my descent into her arms was much too slow to be anything less than celestial. She murmured into my hair.
 
“All great love stories end in blood.”
 
“But why did ours have to be great?”