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11-01-2013, 02:12 AM
We’re all going to die alone.
By now I was used to the idea of being a sad little pilot encased in the head of a biological machine, directing its lips and its legs and its eyes in a desperate attempt to make contact with all the other little pilots whose murky shadows I fancied I saw flickering in the corners in my dreams. There were times I felt so close to them; that was when it ached the most.
These were deep thoughts for such a seemingly shallow mind – old words for one so young – but I was born a fragment of a person. Those scars ran more deeply than the exotic angles of my face would ever show.
Where are you from, Kostya?
I smiled slightly, my eyes flickering in the filly’s direction for an instant. “I was born on an island.” There wasn’t much else to be said for it. I doubted that anything but the most pitiful stroke of hereditary luck could deliver my brother and me to the shores of that island chain ever again. I was not Rodion; nothing bound me to that place but my memories, and few of them were good. “I think they called it Tinuvel.”
The flower was decidedly more engaging than thoughts of my none-too-distant infancy. For my part, I would not have described it as sinister, but I had beguiled a warrior queen and delivered myself unharmed from a devil’s playground – not through bravery, mind, but because it had never occurred to me to fear for my safety (Idiot, Sasha would say).
I chuckled at Ranjiri’s response. Yes, a flower; it swayed slightly in the breeze and my thoughts galloped backward to a night spent in the shadow of a withered tree and a ragged black feather left in the grass.
“It is. Here –.” My acquisitive nature took hold. Considering the gilded filly for a moment, I reached down and gingerly bit through the emerald stalk, drawing back with the flower and a workable length of stem gripped between my teeth. The strange sap leached from the broken end onto my tongue. Trying in my moment of indignity not to look like the rose-wielding suitor of every Disney romance and every realist’s nightmare, I quirked a brow in Ranjiri’s direction and gestured vaguely in the direction of her mane as if to say, ‘May I?’
Hopefully it wasn’t poisonous after all.
By now I was used to the idea of being a sad little pilot encased in the head of a biological machine, directing its lips and its legs and its eyes in a desperate attempt to make contact with all the other little pilots whose murky shadows I fancied I saw flickering in the corners in my dreams. There were times I felt so close to them; that was when it ached the most.
These were deep thoughts for such a seemingly shallow mind – old words for one so young – but I was born a fragment of a person. Those scars ran more deeply than the exotic angles of my face would ever show.
Where are you from, Kostya?
I smiled slightly, my eyes flickering in the filly’s direction for an instant. “I was born on an island.” There wasn’t much else to be said for it. I doubted that anything but the most pitiful stroke of hereditary luck could deliver my brother and me to the shores of that island chain ever again. I was not Rodion; nothing bound me to that place but my memories, and few of them were good. “I think they called it Tinuvel.”
The flower was decidedly more engaging than thoughts of my none-too-distant infancy. For my part, I would not have described it as sinister, but I had beguiled a warrior queen and delivered myself unharmed from a devil’s playground – not through bravery, mind, but because it had never occurred to me to fear for my safety (Idiot, Sasha would say).
I chuckled at Ranjiri’s response. Yes, a flower; it swayed slightly in the breeze and my thoughts galloped backward to a night spent in the shadow of a withered tree and a ragged black feather left in the grass.
“It is. Here –.” My acquisitive nature took hold. Considering the gilded filly for a moment, I reached down and gingerly bit through the emerald stalk, drawing back with the flower and a workable length of stem gripped between my teeth. The strange sap leached from the broken end onto my tongue. Trying in my moment of indignity not to look like the rose-wielding suitor of every Disney romance and every realist’s nightmare, I quirked a brow in Ranjiri’s direction and gestured vaguely in the direction of her mane as if to say, ‘May I?’
Hopefully it wasn’t poisonous after all.
