|
Do they fear her? Do they tremble when she slips between the trees, her sooty coat eating the light? Are they afraid of her skull-painted face, her clouded eye and eye of gold? These are the questions Confutatis asks herself. These are the slippery questions she wants a fearful answer to. Yes, I am afraid. Those are the words she longs for. Her dreams are not to be revered, admired by the gods themselves in their divine thrones. What drives her oily black body is the dream; the dream of being what makes the hair prickle on the back of one's neck, a spider crawl down one's spine, to make mouths go dry and hearts go pounding in chests, so loud and so frantic.
One day, they will all know for her name. Not because they think of her as precious hero, not a Bambi grown up, not because she is king of the forest. It will be because of how the darkness whispers her name and the shadows cling to her; she will be the Disney villains, but, oh, so much worse.
His own chuckle is sweet on her ears, reminiscient of another laugh...
The wings he lost. Perhaps he was an angel, shut out from heaven. Maybe they plucked his wings, stripped him bare. They left him hollow, an empty vessel, unwholesome like the slender birch trees in winter, hard agains the sky without their leaves of sweet yellow-green. If she half-shuts her eye, she can see the blood dripping from his shoulders, weeping for what is lost. How vivid her imagination is. Skullface can see the gilded white feathers, strewn on the ground. Angel fallen from heaven. Her mind broods over this, in the peculiar half-mad way she thinks, before she shakes away the cobwebs of thoughts, spins her spider webs anew inside her broken mind.
Confutatis lets free a sigh, grating it coarsely from her chest.
"I have no nightmares, Fallen. Perhaps I am one." Her voice a rusted purr, rock and stone attempting to be crushed velvet. "I say... do you know a blood boy named Déodat? He smelled of winter, like you..." And if Fallen does know of Déodat, and has acquaintanced himself with the stallion of blood and shadow, snow and glass, does he harbor the same animosity towards other breeds, other species? Her head tips eerily to study the stallion chiseled from ice. There is nothing in his voice, nothing he says, to allude to it. Perhaps Déodat is alone in his racism. Or maybe they are all like him.
CONFUTATIS
and when you meet me, you at long last acquaintance yourself with death in all its magnificent glory.
|
.svg/2000px-Google_Chrome_icon_(2011).svg.png){kind=icon}
