Andarin: The Mountains: and do soul-searching research and find there is no such thing as soul; --

“ I have spread my dreams beneath your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. ”

-- Yeats

She listened – quietly, intently, but, truth be told, not believing.

Perhaps a few months ago, before – well, before – she would have understood it and even believed it. But the worm burrowing in her viscera, the tiny, ugly thing nestled there like an unborn child so like the ones she would never bear, wouldn’t let her believe.

Instead it showed her something else, as accurately as a painting or photograph would, but more real because it was her mind. It showed her her sister’s face, alight as in the days they played with sticks and planned to tear down the sky. It showed Alkonost singing to the dead thing she loved and wanted even though she shouldn’t.

It showed her this and it showed her other things, too – it showed her the mechanics of copulation (for, indeed, that was what it was – a veneer over a purely animal act, as instinctive as the act of breathing) and the way they straggled and panted and sweated all over each other in the name of words and emotions as mad and inconsistent as the worm inside her.

“Fine words,” she agreed gently, as quiet and calm and content as ever, even as the worm twisted in her guts and showed her something else too, something that made the jewel slung around her neck pulse and glow with a warm sort of light. It was red, like him, and for one small moment she saw their faces blend and transfigure themselves into the same one. “Do you believe them?”

I don’t, her eyes said.

But he was a scholar and scholars, in Jörmungandr’s experience, needed angst as much as they needed their own lifeblood, if not more.

Joh, however, needed only one thing – a yellow-eyed mare the pale white of seafoam. She needed no morals, no traditions, no children, no lovers, no ambitions, no kingdom or rank or title or even gods; she needed no love, though she studied it with the same interest of a scientist bent over its desk – dim in the laboratory’s fluorescent lights as she took notes and she compared them, studied the curious phenomenon they named love and found it rather wanting.

Perhaps what she felt was love, the purest and darkest incarnation of it - love forbidden, cramped, twisted, flavored with the blood of the worm that lived inside her, cradled and safe.

She did not care.

The worm inside her grew and spread, fine as spidersilk, into her very soul, if she had such a beast inside her.

She didn’t believe that, either. Useless belief was for scholars; Jörmungandr was no scholar.

“I think many make themselves believe it, because otherwise there’s nothing left,” she said mostly to herself and thought. The winds around her grew very still; like a lake, they lapped at her skin very gently. “Only peace and stability and happiness. You can’t be happy, because happiness exists where passion isn’t needed or wanted or even missed and you thrive in passion. But passion is pain...”

The worm approved of her thoughts; they were its own.

“... and pain is slavery.”

In the sunlight, drawing from his side like a black ripple, she turned her face to the sky she had once dreamed to bring down. It was a beautiful day and the young mare, with the parasite did not stop her from admiring it.

“But then, what do I know?”

It never would; even then she was calm and that calm radiated from her body in almost tangible ways, spiels of electricity shifting and altering the framework of other minds. It was just impossible to grow violent around Jörmungandr. Her inner peace saw to that.

“What’s it like, to be a stallion?”

All the while, Hatred crooned in the drum of her heart.

jörmungandr;
of night and light and half-light