in winter a song sung at a window freezes as surely as dripping water

[anushka-excolo.livejournal.com]

Monday October 12th, dusk, the Voronin Manor.

By now they have found the body and the sheriff is seeing that Glass is told. By now the whore who wants to be mayor is beginning to miss her dreams. I see them, even if she does not. By now Gaueko will be settled at the Whitechapel. The house is silent. I sit on the great swoop of the staircase and listen to the thoughts of the town. It does not block out my own so well as I would like.

Does Iblis think his un-flesh bestows the same power that humans have forged gods with? It does not. It is something altered, whether he and Gaueko see it or not. It is a smooth marble statue carved with a bright chisel, where humans weather their gods to shape over centuries, each whisper of their name, each prayer or moment of fright a drop of water, and the stone grows into wild and terrible shapes, wonderful shapes, beautiful strong shapes.

But the end times smashed all those stones to rubble and they can never be rebuilt, never mind the darting dogs in the night time woods, never mind the crunch of bones. Perhaps some part of me still hoped for Gaueko when he came back that night, dragged his broken self across the marble hall and lay there knitting himself back towards wholeness slowly. I helped him into my bed, though I do not sleep in it now. There was something right about the way he healed himself, the way his great body grew to know its own hurt and accepted it.

Perhaps a part of me thought, however briefly, that there was a sliver of hope for the gods, if they could take their own fall with such acceptance, such dignity in their lack of dignity, if they did not shy from the long process of power seeping back into them.

Then Iblis, and his quick fix. I could have wept, but it was not in me. I was right to despair of the gods. And the night was ringing like a bell with Wanda's white shape darting through the woods, laughing and kneeling and screaming, and with Iblis with his heart and his tears and his girlish sighs, and the war god spilling his own blood to ease the ache of sadness in him. I sat in the house and I wished I could not see. I am tired with this town. What a fool I have been.

[closed]

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[bakeneko-excolo.livejournal.com]

Boku had his meal and his night spent under precious weight. Waking to the song of a heartbeat in his ears. Neko met a horse of light and shadow, startling her new older brother with her darting greeting to the stallion. A leave taking and the cat marks the pup with a push of her jaw and kneading feet. The others are quiet and still and waiting.

The sun starts to sink and I feel a pull. I wait until I am in the garden to change from small, sleek fur into muscles and fangs and height. The gardens are filled with the memories of summer, the chill of winter already killing their color.

The door of the house creaks when I open it, as if to claim it is more than dust and memories. She sits like a statue, shaped by fire and will and desperate choices. The wind touches us and I look up to see the sky through the dome. I have no more words for the ache in my throat. Instead, I sit close enough to wrap myself around her and breath her scent.

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Sometimes I see the paths of beings through the town as streaks of colour, like those few images of the world before I have, where cars slick the streets with their lights, where the world is wound so tight as to be running faster, faster. I see monster approach in this way, a smear of neat black-and-white, like the little pied magpies that played once in the garden.

I wonder if he smells where the blood was smeared over the floor, here. If he catches his own scent. I enjoy the silence of him moving through the house, as if he is not really here, or as if the world has not caught on to his presence, quite yet. Then I fold myself into the curled space of his arm and catch the quiet happiness in him mingle with something like animal dread.

"Well, monster," I say, tilting my face up to him and raising my eyebrow. "Such a mess you leave about the place."

[bakeneko-excolo.livejournal.com]

Her eyebrow arcs like an arrow's flight and I scent the air where it lands. Dried blood and feline urine. I wonder who he truly finds his master if he drags himself here when near to death. "We should have ended it, rabid animals need to be put down. They never do learn their way out of their sickness." All the damned deities in this town have the same rot. Do they know how far they have fallen then what they could have been? Is it that which makes them mad and huddle for warmth around a false fire in a tower? All spirals. Are we rising or falling?

So many questions and all the charts in an attic only give rise to more.

I look down on the angled curves in my arm and trace the pale arm with the back of my claws. "You have changed once more." Brimstone no longer burns under her scent, but there is still fire in the corner she opened in my mind.

[anushka-excolo.livejournal.com]

"We should have ended it, rabid animals need to be put down."

"Yes," I say, though that much should have been obvious - was obvious, I know. The monster's mind is dark and quiet and alien, and where I once I might have burrowed into it as a worm into an ancient apple (and I think of Tezcatlipoca rising in the carnival) now I see it spreading as a shadow through air, no more solid enough to burrow into than a fine mist is, but something to mingle with, to give up form and become. "They never do learn their way out of their sickness."

But I do not. I enjoy talking with him, and the hum of other minds in the town are enough of a background hum to leave no space in me silent. I stroke the tip of my finger along the long flint arc of one claw and smile up at him. "I saw you pretending mercy to yourself, monster, and the pride behind it." My tone is chiding, but amused beneath it. The powers are shifting and I am no longer so invested in their channels. "You have changed once more."

I lean against him, and the quiet house hollows around us, and I think of telling him what I wished for, when a wish was offered. I think of saying I have made myself a weapon, but it would make him sad, so i do not. Instead simply nod. "I have. And have you returned because you have changed your mind, and wish to know the future now?"

[bakeneko-excolo.livejournal.com]

The pride she mentions is true. For cats have their own sort of pride and monsters too. My initial shaping was by a people full of pride. I lean down and lick the pale line where her hair parts at the top of her head and taste only dust and skin. Her hair catches a little in the rasp of my tongue. It is an apology of sorts, but more acknowledgment.

She is a warm spot against my side, no longer cooled by marble floors. "I have. And have you returned because you have changed your mind, and wish to know the future now?" The answer I gave the last time hovers on my lips but I do not give it voice. I still want the hope, but more, I want a piece of her to carry into that future. Winter is coming and I will not have that garden dance again. "Yes." I let all of that answer flow up to my skin for her to taste if she likes.

[anushka-excolo.livejournal.com]

His rough tongue traces the parting in my hair, and I find myself laughing for the first time in days or weeks. In return I take his big paw in my hand and kiss the back of it, like a prince might kiss the hand of a princess, like Zann once kissed my hand in the garden beneath startled birds. "Yes."

It is a decision he made days ago, and hardly admitted to himself while he lurked in the unsleep while his form was not the one taken. I wonder what the others would think if I talked to him while he hid there in the back of their minds. I could do it, if I wished. Perhaps I will surprise him. "You are a melancholy beast, when those inside you are happy," I say. He is thinking of the last dusk of summer when we danced in the garden, but the flowers there are too scorched to bloom again.

There is so much I could tell him, and so much of it is sadness, or fear, or great change and great bravery. There is every second of him ticking down into a nothing he has not foreseen all mapped out like a lawn studded with daisies, but I am not a cruel woman. I am hardly a woman at all. And so I do not tell him those things which he expects to hear. Instead I smile and stroke the smooth fur at the centre of his brow, and say, "you will see your homeland again."

[bakeneko-excolo.livejournal.com]

Her laughter chimes out and her chivalrous kiss soothes my feelings like a grooming tongue. All these things I tuck inside myself, as the others store their drapes of silk and small horses in the attic. "You are a melancholy beast, when those inside you are happy," I turn to face her slightly, meeting eyes filled with sky with my own dark ones. "Perhaps that is part of our balance. Sometimes I do not think our markings were by chance." My claw traces the sharp line on my fur where black meets white.

I wait for her words. I wait for death and leaving and hope that it will be a worthy one. That my ending will not be in vain or petty. That is pride too. "you will see your homeland again." Her touch is a kiss upon my head. The future she chooses to share a blessing.

Leaning down, I drag my cheekbone along hers, as the cat will scent her chosen. "I wish I could give you something. Something more than quiche and melancholy."

[anushka-excolo.livejournal.com]

"Silly monster. You have given me so many lifetimes of memories, all those towns you passed to come here, all of the faces you wear and the thoughts that come with them. You have given me all of the people you've met, and shown me your home in Japan, and the things which made you and the things you decide to keep with you, and all of the information you gather about this town and the things which happen here? Do you think I am demure and polite when I pick through your mind?" And I show him my teeth, and I laugh. "I am not."

I stand and take his hand, lead him through the house with its empty rooms and its hollows where centuries of ghosts rubbed the air raw, but no more. "I have something to show you," I say. Through the parlour where my father's chair is a blackened heap of sticks and singed horsehair and burnt upholstery. Through the old ballroom and into the kitchen, where ivy pours in through the broken windows, and water drips from the taps. On the scrubbed oak table is a small tin of ashes. I have been burning the photographs one by one. The last is left on top: a day long ago when a woman and her husband showed their son the sea. It is all silver and wind and Konrad's face is blurred where he stands between us in the sand, one hand in each of our own. He never could keep still. Always moving. I give the photograph to monster.

"Keep it," I say. We will not see each other again.

[bakeneko-excolo.livejournal.com]

She is fierce as any predator as she lists the prey I have laid at her feet, if unwittingly. We both make no noise as we walk through a house empty. No echoes, as if no walls were there to reflect them, just a mirage.

Cold ash reaches my nose and there is an image made solid. It is her and two males. Young and old and the sea. "Keep it," I hear the farewell in her words. The finality of it and winter closes in.

I place the photo in the same space the weapons the others use come from when they shift. Now it will be with me no matter where I go. My claw pierces my lip and I feel the tears and they fall to meet it. I offer them both to her, my last offering with no food beneath it as I touch my lips to hers.

[anushka-excolo.livejournal.com]

After the wars photographs were rare things, worth more than the diamonds I pulled from their necklaces and threw into the verges of the town, or in the park, or into the gutters so that they shimmer as they never have before. I made sure to scatter the smallest over the lawn outside Fiona's house, for I remember her and Miss Silverleaf, and even if the rain washes them away, and of course it will, I think she will like to wake to see the grass sparkle like that.

Monster stands in my kitchen looking at the picture intently, before he tucks it away. It is a strange thing, but I feel as I kiss him that we two would have been suited another age better than this one, for all our peculiarities. I wind my arms around his neck and though I taste the blood from his lip, it is meaningless now as it has never been before. I close my eyes and kiss him, and I imagine the kitchen awash with fire, and the house crumbling around us, and the clean feeling one gets when pain releases one from its grip. The woman in the photograph is crying. I would like to stay in this moment for ever.

[bakeneko-excolo.livejournal.com]

Her lips are soft against my thin ones, her tongue soft and tasting of my blood and salt against the barbs of mine. My arms wrap around her and bring her up so I no longer lean down to her, but meet her lips with her body lighter than the weight of her picture. Soon she shall be too far off to kiss. So I kiss her now and wrap it up inside me as well.

I kiss her goodbye.