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200: heart

How to climb a mountain. Step by step, inch by inch, hand in hand. Falling in crevasses and getting back out again, because this is not the hole you're going to die in today. Magic when you can spare it, rope when you can't, and always hands and arms and legs and backs and hearts, yours and others. I know, it hurts. Keep going anyway. It really is a terrible metaphor. There's nothing special about being higher up.

Are we the Bal Molagmer, then? Is that why we climb? Nameless, faceless heroes, braving the mountain of fire, and stealing burning stones? I never did find out what those were for. Perhaps we can use them to rebuild our burned bridges. Burning bridges, building paths, climbing mountains, escaping pits. So many clichés. But they're not supposed to accurately represent the chaos, they're maps out of it. Prophecies are just stories with happy endings, and you can write your own as you go. Leave them behind, so that others might find their way. They'll never know if it was true, and it won't matter. We go different, and in thunder. Each to the beat of our own doom-drum. I'm going to break his heart. That's not a metaphor. According to Vivec, there is no bone that cannot be broken, except for the heart bone. Proving that for all his poetry, he was not immune to sentimental clichés. Of course, with Vivec, the danger is always that it might not be a metaphor. God has no need of theory and he is armoured head to toe in terror. I'm scared, too. But unlike Vehk, I am shielded by my mortality, and I cannot be trapped in the cracked crystal of my (im)perfections forever. Shift ye in your skin, I say to the Trinimac-eaters. Pitch your voices into the colour of bruise. This whole island, ruined and reborn. Surviving the fire, again and again. All of us, finding new ways to survive... and then surviving those. Surviving the forms we had to take, to stay alive in the places we found ourselves, learning to breathe ashes, drink poison, eat shit. We can do this, because whatever survives, grows. And whatever happens next, something will survive of me, because I exist now. I have already existed, and this cannot be undone, short of deeper magic than I'll ever know. Survive, if not intact, then by parts. My blood will join the ash and feed the mushrooms. My bones... my bones will be quiet, unthreatening. My soul is energy, in which all lost possibilities are regained. For now... we are Nerevarine. Failed, false, fallen Incarnates. You are Nerevar, my love, as I am Nerevar, as all of us breathing air and ash and magic are Nerevar, because he died and we live, and we are all the Changed Ones. All Trinimac, all Malacath, bruise-tinted, shit-stained heroes. Stealing whatever godhood we can. Wearing our curses as badges of honour, because fuck you, Azura, that's why. We have no ancestors guiding us. We banished them all, again and again, though they wait beyond the door, always returning. Sometimes because they love us, but love alone is not enough. But then, love is never alone. It is born of, and parent to, so many ugly and beautiful things. Things to grow, to nurture, and be nurtured by. Things to build. A city of swords, to cut ourselves into better shapes. A city of gods and monsters, to be razed and restored, brick by brick. A home, secret and safe as any pocket dimension, which is to say, never as safe as you hope, but... sometimes doors need opening from the outside. I move, and I pulse at the heart of a web of threads... no, a net... no... a bloodline. A lacing network of living support, easily grazed at the edges, but more healing and resilient then I could ever imagine. It's not a thing I can leave behind, because it isn't there, isn't outside. I'll carry it with me. I grew it myself. I'm taking it all. Taking all my blood and ash, all my ghosts and bones. To find what lies beyond my burning, in the pathless, unstoned places between is and is-not-yet. What was and what could be. To plant something new... no... to help something different grow. Not an ocean, wild and unpredictable, sinking all who incur its disapproval. Not a garden, clipped into a false, symmetrical notion of beauty, weeds pulled up by the roots. Something in between, blurring the boundary, like a swamp. If my mother is earth and my father is water, then I am neither and both, a new experiment, my own substance and solution. Soft and yielding... but sometimes, when people think swampland is solid, they drown themselves, trying to step on it. The stone that recalls it is really water... what if it knew how to be both? It's no deception. Unless it is. Say no elegies. Welcoming the living, the dead and the in-between, all who need to rest somewhere with no need to choose between sinking and swimming. A place to be vague, for a while, indistinct. Cocooned, liquid and lingering in the grey maybe of creation, to see what solidifies. Of healing and metamorphosis. Of absorbing toxins, and nourishing sprouts. Tangled and illegible. Hard to translate, because its definitions keep shifting. A ward to its enemies, but part of its charm, to its devotees. Who know that love demands no dissection, no labels. I still hope you might choose to be there. I think you'd understand, too. I don't think ashland is so different from swampland. The Velothi say that on certain days, all the hidden seeds of a certain plant will all bloom at once, and flash the whole land one colour in a brief, day-long frenzy of purple or gold. I'd love to see it. But I already know the Ashlands will teem with flowers, if you're there. I have to go back, because I've changed and it hasn't. I can see the invisible, now. I can see in the dark. I can see through walls, see the pale-fringed lichen on the other side. I can see gently, obliquely. Out of the corner of my eye, for some vanish under the weight of too much visibility. I can see, and be seen, according to my will. I can slip into the molten margins, where touching another soul is possible, and extend a hand. My other will always be yours. I look at you across the fire. And you aren't my true-love, that isn't a thing. But I love you, and we dragged each other through the hardest year of our lives. And whoever I love next, and whoever I am loved by... it was you that taught me how. So until the next change comes... until the ash takes and remakes us, until we are eaten again... look back at me, through the air and ash. See me here, in this moment, alive and whole, safe from all possible harm. If we fall, and they find us, my hand will be in yours, and they'll know who we were. He drew a long, clear breath that lifted and filled him like the sail of a boat. His heart rising with the wind, Iriel moved forwards. end. thank you for reading. previous: 199: keening beginning: 1: numb