ultima

Her past life could be compared to a pea. Small. Green. Insignificant. And smothered under a hundred mattresses, cushions, at the summit of which she perched sleepless and fretful, bursting with potential energy. 

Goose-down could not save her from reality, as much as she willed herself to forget. Chamomile and vervain couldn’t either, though she chewed so much of it the air around her beautiful head was colored by the scent. And how she wished she could be a girl with her head in the clouds again, beautiful clouds made of candy-floss and promise – she wanted the part enough to become it, trotting after the Doctors toting baskets of herbs and laughing gaily at half the things that caught her eye, sneering at the remainder. But that was only a transfiguration of daylight; the moon reveals all truths, and by night she was a creature other than Alph, who lived only for earth.

Ultima, Dearest Ever Dreamt, Crowned by Nightingales, For Whom Dawn Breaks in the East, was a girl with dreams, and they were not the sweet kind. Not for a year now. Not since the desert glass, and the crocodile who ate her heart and spat it back a different shape. (She remembered the way it looked, steaming in a red cradle, raw and hissing where teeth had broken the membrane. She remembered the way it felt to lift it, to carry it; set safely back in her chest it kept a broken rhythm, like a clock too fast or too slow. She kept crocodile time, now. She had carnivore dreams, toothsome and sharp, and she feared them.)

Down from bed she came, her wings half-flared, the young muscle protesting from being held so long in one position. Orangemoon smelled perpetually of rain, and a faint tang of ozone that promised a storm by sunrise. She got the feeling she shouldn’t go far, but it kept to her gut; in her heart was a frenetic abandon that pushed her tired limbs far, far and hard, harder, until she left the woods and her wings snapped out full and long, unhindered by the close-grown trees. 

The night was deeper as it stretched over the meadow. In the dark her eyes were bright, the long lashes opening and closing like moth’s wings. To look at her was to feel a buzzing in your head, a tightness in your chest; she leaned forward as if to counter a strong wind, her wings held aloft and trembling for take-off, her entire posture yelling: I am ready! But there was no wind. Her wings trembled because they were weak still, too weak to fly even a mile, and her posture unwound quickly with hoarseness. 

The moments that passed then were like straws, set one by one across her slender back. As she counted them, they took new weight, and the night’s negative space filled with an insurmountable dread. Once upon a time, the stars twinkling through the crosshatch of branch and bough, the moon’s light littering the forest floor like silver leaves – that had been a comfort. Staring up at the sky now, though, she didn’t recognize those stars, and that moon seemed too callous to be the one that had fallen so whimsically at her feet in a bygone age. They would not guide her home.

She sank to her knees unbidden, her long, stiltish legs folding gently into the tall grass. The ground was springy beneath her shins, half waterlogged, and a soft wind picked up from the east, ruffling her pale, waving hair. Her wings were the last to relent, quaking violently, burning with the effort to remain high and proud. One moment. Another. And then they lowered, gentle in their defeat; and there was only the girl again, neither Ultima nor Alph, nestled in the grass like a baby bird.

She was ready, but had nowhere to go.

ultima

Young as she was, a single year still had meaning. It was a quarter of her life lost to this grass, this sky, this blank space. She’d seen it change with every season and felt wildly misplaced, a wheel that didn’t spin like the others did, stuck fast with longing; her only shovel was memory, and it might’ve been that she was a child (and a lost one, at that) or that it took all her energy to keep her emotions from welling over, but she could never dig fast enough to break loose. In ways that hadn’t changed, her feet still mired in heartbreak. Gazing out across the muddy hills and dales, spangled with late dew and stars, she didn’t know what to make of it.

“Everything alright?”

“No,” she said automatically, though the sound preceded the turn of her head by several moments. Her eyes lingered on the meadow, too, before sliding across the night to his face. They narrowed immediately. It might not have been noticeable – it was dark, and besides, the expression wasn’t one of fear or loathing. It was confusion, mixed with simple curiosity. Pleasantries weren’t lost on her; she understood the importance of appearing interested and how it could be used as both a kindness and a polite rebuke. Basic deportment; for Ultima, as thoughtless as breathing. “Thank you.” What troubled her now was that she couldn’t decide which of those he meant, this man who stared down at her, dully, from seemingly miles away.

She cocked her head just so, tassels chiming faintly. In another time – and in another place, and in another frame of mind – she might have been more forward about it. 

“Why do you ask?”

ultima

The word struck her – disheartened. It wasn’t quite a slap but more like a flick to the nose, her eyelashes swiping once, twice with the faintest surprise; it was a loss of confidence, wasn’t it? A loss of drive? Diving into it, though, it felt more physical, like having the organ outright removed. With an involuntary shiver, she thought that crocodile teeth wouldn’t be any good for that – no precision, too wild. 

But then again, disheartening someone didn’t have to be a neat, methodical surgery. It was just as effective to let it persist over a long period of time, the muscle pulverized into fine red dust, slipping steadily through the neck of an hourglass or the gaps in a craggy jaw. There in the grass, staring both at and through the strange, taciturn man who’d appeared before her, Ultima felt that realization click into place like a long-lost gear. “Yes,” she thought, not realizing she’d spoken aloud. Her tone was not unreadable in its flatness – it was like plains, like seeing for miles and miles in every direction. The words echoed in her chest and then settled on the floor like Orangemoon leaves. 

“That’s right.” 

In this light she could almost perfectly remember the goldfish pond, wide and curved like a cup, brimming with pondskaters and watercress on the north edge. Beneath the surface was the constant flash of black and orange scales, scattering ripples like capricious raindrops. At night the ripples slowed, though. Then it was only her, and the lemon tree, and the smell of darkness like silver or mint. It was so real. So close.

And then her eyes flashed open, and again the memory flew away across the flatland for miles, miles, miles.

Nothing. For several moments, nothing. With time, though, the little determination that mustered in her shoulders fell away, leaving only the fledgling behind.

“And if I want it back?” she spoke again, softly, a faint wind threading through her rumpled forelock. “If it belongs to me, if I need it, if it’s my right?” Her breath fogged faintly, clouding as she turned towards him. 

“What then? Do I fight the world, sir? Is that what you do?”

ultima

Sometimes she thought with frightening conviction that she could hurt him – Raistlynn – that she could beat him black and blue with star and stone and steel for all he had taken from her. But that was only the crocodile in her; she was not a fighter. She’d been born as snugly as a pearl in an oyster, lily-white and all-too-precious; she could raise her pettiness and her ache to a head and it’d be only as effectual as bringing flowers to a gunfight. Bang and the spring comes—Bang and the hothouse swells with a reel of violins—Bang, I move you with child’s tears and a spray of baby’s breath, bang—And even the wind coiling in her hair found it sad, and grew still. 

Ultima or Alph, or the in-between thing tucked into the tall grass and the damp earth, this was the full extent of her power. (She didn’t want more of it. She only wanted love, and a home, and faces to call familiar, but not those at the Edge.) Before he could answer, she already knew that a warpath wasn’t one she could walk, or fly.

All she could do was change, charged by circumstance. (She wanted only to be a top, spinning swiftly, swiftly, on her own.)

Day by day she had felt some part of herself slipping, like leaves shaking loose of the trees. Autumn was coming. Winter was too, and afterwards the spring would return and the leaves would grow anew. But they would not be the same ones, and the idea rolled a heavy shiver down her spine, smashing through her flatland like an earthquake. Reflexively, Ultima huddled into the crook of her wide white wings, drawn smotheringly flush against her shoulders and flanks, and stared at the man’s hooves, caked with mud and debris. When at last she spoke, it was so softly that it was nearly lost in the pale feathers, so small and frightened that she could barely recognize her own voice.

“What were you like before?”

Her eyes stung, glassy and tremulous, but unbroken.

“Were you better?” 

ultima

“Were you happy? Is it a crime to be happy? Is that what’s stupid about it? I was stupid, too,” she said, the words thick and slow like honey in her mouth, but far from sweet. (Or maybe they were, and she’d simply forgotten the taste.) She wasn’t even sure it was her mouth that had spoken, though the voice was certainly hers; her questions had the innocence and the peculiar intensity trademarked by children, and at his feet, staring up into his hooded eyes, a child she was. A pretty child. A fairly well-mannered one, too, if demanding. That was all she had ever been and it was all she had ever aspired to be. Flatland, carrying on in every direction, glorying in its flatness.

But now there were mountains, thrown up by plates shifting beneath her feet. “You cannot go back.” Now she knew the word ‘ocean’, “You can only move forward,” and she understood with frightening clarity that the true nature of the earthquake that broke her heart was the joy she found in the syllables. 

Stunned was a euphemism, but of course she was stunned. To pick up the pieces of your own nest and fit them back together, only to realize you’d compensated for lost parts with new ones, strange ones – to find that those new parts were happiness openly challenging the happiness you had before, as spring challenges the earth to begin again, similar to last year but still different— That was terrible, wasn’t it? It was frightening, wasn’t it, to realize that in spite of all fear, in your bones you were destined to seek and love change? “But I don’t want to,” she thought, burrowing tightly into her distress, folding smaller and smaller and smaller, “I don’t know how to, I, I don’t—I don’t—”

This time, she knew it was her mouth.

Her head snapped up swiftly, a single teardrop clinging to the lashes of her startled eyes as they found his. The little confessions hung between them like old fireworks, leaving ghost trails in the dark. For what felt like a year she was still as porcelain, gaze locked to his, that teardrop bobbing, bobbing. In her chest that heart seized, released, seized again. And then she blinked— The teardrop flew—

And it was gone.

Up to that moment, she’d had the nagging suspicion that this, too, was only a dream. Dreams spoke honestly, if one cared to listen; the man who’d been a steady testament to her wonder and her fear might have been a manifestation of the truths she carried, someone of the same breed and kind as the crocodile in her, though decidedly more gentle. Looking out over the fields now, though, she had to wonder.

“I hope,” she said at last, the introduction of some grand statement that in the concluding would decide for both of them. But she couldn’t finish it. Her mouth was open just so, mind as wide and empty and full, just like the night. I hope: what? I hope: for whom? I hope: why? Ah, she thought, mouth closing.

Finding his eyes again, Ultima smiled, delicate, but steady as starlight. 

“I hope.” 

And that was all.

ultima

It was the reason birds flew into windowpanes. Not ignorance, not foolishness. Not a shortcoming of a bird’s own making, for birds were such careful builders. It was only the world’s love of struggle. 

Perhaps a hundred times she had seen the tiny bodies littered around the Edge, chests pulsing frantically, the eyes glinting, wild, before falling flat and still. Talkative jays. Clever magpies. She had as many prayers for them as she did dread of the walls that bound them, even as the sky lurched above. But she had seen swallows skittering across the greenhouse roof, too, or very narrowly missing the ragged parapets of the wall, and that was what she felt then: the impact as her brittle bones struck the glass and buckled; the gravity of another defeat; but more than that, the realization that this time, she could nearly see over. 

“I hope you find your way.”

Next time. That was her smile carried, greenstick fractures, aching chest, and all. (Next time, whether this was a dream or not, we will be better. We will.) 

“And I you,” she said. (It was a promise worth keeping.)

He’d already turned away by then, something flashing through his face so quickly she thought she might have imagined it. Perhaps he was a dream, after all; she felt very much like she was reaching for the end of one, trying vainly to remember what a moment ago had been so vivid. (He felt like water to her. Water on the surface was placid and cool, but if you were very quiet and very thoughtful you could sense it: underneath, it was rippling and thriving and almost violent with life. Ultima, who had child’s eyes that missed many things but caught others in their golden nets, thought she might have seen that in him.) 

Eventually she contented herself with the wondering, her golden gaze drifting from the line of his cheek and out to the meadow ahead. It’s late, she thought, connecting the unfamiliar stars, staring back at the moon as it peeked through a veil of clouds. How long had they been here, talking? A few minutes? A few hours? She thought to ask (Where will you go now? Where is your road taking you?), and then held her tongue again; there was something tenuous hanging in the air between them, and if she said the wrong thing, she feared it might break.

So breathing out, the girl pushed herself to her feet, wings splayed for balance as the blood rushed to support her stiltish legs, gone numb with cold and worry. Immediately – It’s late, I have to be going, it was a pleasure to meet you – a wealth of niceties to draw the night to a close. Lingering a moment, though, she decided again that she dare not. (That was the thing with dreams. Because they were like you, of you, they understood even when nothing was spoken.) 

Tossing the hair from her face, she took one wobbling step, then another, stronger, and vanished back towards the treeline. Back to bed. Back to routine. 

Back to try the glass, again.

(Goodbye.)