[ Respond | Andarin: The Mountains ]
Posted by alkonost on March 8, 2009, 6:13 pm Alkonost understood then that life - all life, not just the ugly parts like violence and hate, not just the beautiful parts like her crown and the roses – was pain. An individual’s existence was measured not by what one had done, but by how much one had suffered in the process. The sheltered, blesséd few who weathered no hardship, who felt no sorrow, who lived their lives untouched by jealousy and rage, could walk from the cradle to the grave without ever taking their first breath. Now, at the lowest pit in her short and turbulent life, she suffered more acutely and burned more brightly than ever. Jörmungandr was somewhere behind her, hidden now by brush and trees and the ragged surface of the earth itself. Still farther she fled, sweating and gasping and stumbling with every excruciating step. Too soon, she said to herself in an endless loop, too soon, but wave upon wave of fresh agony came anyway – faster, harder, more potent with each spasm. Finally the pain brought her to her knees. Joh? Everything’s going to be okay. What a terrible, terrible lie, she thought. And then there were no more words to delay the inevitable, nothing left in her body and heart to hold back the tide, so she surrendered to it with silent dignity, as she had learned to do on the very day of her birth. Like an automaton Alkonost pushed when her muscles willed it, lay still when it let her rest, operating thoughtlessly and without the fear that had before driven her to flight. Fear is a poison; there is no place for fear in childbirth. She toiled and sweated and suffered, every moment stretching into an eternity in which all of her thoughts were read back to her in an endless, muttering drone. Then, as her strength faded, something began to emerge. The world was small and dark and lonely. She knew this because that was all it had ever been, growing steadily smaller around her until the day she assumed it would simply crush her, ending her before she had ever really begun. She was fine with that, because she knew nothing else but that the world was small and dark and lonely, and growing smaller by the hour. When the world began its murderous work around her, she wasn’t (couldn’t be) frightened. She knew only equanimity, and so she welcomed the world’s churning and groaning against her flesh, submitting to its will as it collapsed as a whole around her time and time again and compressed her ever more tightly. Soon she would be a tiny, beautiful ribbon, drifting about in her liquid universe to adorn the hair of the next unwitting occupant. That was okay, too. But the world was not all darkness anymore. A faint red light seeped into her eye and expanded even as her world continued to constrict around her belly. It grew and grew and she marveled at its newness until she felt the first brush of cold air against her nose. And as she leaned instinctively toward the sun, that treacherous chill took hold of her fluttering heart. Alkonost lay exhausted on her bed of leaves, sides heaving and strangely empty. The forest around her was only a dim suggestion, an afterthought on her retina. She felt at peace and, idly, wondered if dying could feel the same way sometimes. It didn’t matter. She didn’t intend to die just yet. Heaving her trembling body upright, she beheld her child for the first time, a little gray nose and sooty legs protruding like odd growths from the amniotic sac. Instinctively she bathed the blood and membrane from its skin. Its warmth was alien, almost thrilling, and it was not until the tiny creature lay before her in its entirety that she paused. It lay there like a perfect stone sculpture, eyes tightly shut. And, like a perfect stone sculpture, it was still. She stared at it as though from a great distance. Her mind was a sea of nonsense and of bitterness, tossing her about like a raft on its titanic swells until in her distress she regurgitated a single, almost-unaudible word “Mariel.” Joh? Everything’s going to be okay. Alkonost curled herself delicately around the lifeless filly and draped her neck across its side, feeling its stillness like a gaping wound. And for the first time she sang to another horse, her voice rich and melodious and sad, fading into the bowels of the forest because nobody was alive to hear her.
173.57.141.218
‘I cannot get out,’ said the starling.
“ ”
‘Then I will let you out,’ said I, ‘cost what it will.’
- Laurence Sterne, 1768
these are the clouds about the fallen sun,
the majesty that shuts his burning eye.
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