i am the vanguard of your destruction

His pulse was the slow and steady roll of the waves.

His breathing, the sea sighing against shore.

He wasn't much more than driftwood—discarded, salt-stained, waterlogged. Pale. Not quite recognizable as what they once had been. Flotsam and jetsam; little clues and pieces of a whole. Nothing fancy, just something that ought to be dead but didn't have enough decency to actually be.

He'd made a choice, on that foggy, moonlit night. It had been a vain thing, driven by fear and pride and a dream of glory, but little more than vanity parading as altruism. Had Tembovu seen how hollow his soul had been? Was that why there had been mourning in his voice? Because Mauja, fool and dreamer, had chosen to have no distant horizon, to have his life span from now until forever, with no real end in sight.

He had wanted to make a change. To be some kind of timeless sentinel, a guardian pacing the world and doing good—keeping peace and time. Being more than the sad, bitter residue of a brief and bright fire.

Being more than the sum of himself.

Pathetic.

He had chosen isolation. He had chosen loneliness. He had chosen agony.

A long, long road unwalked, unaccompanied. A journey with no end. Surely, nothing better than what he had already been through; so why had he taken it? And what had he done with it, his curse masquerading as a blessing? And what had he done with himself?

If his mind hadn't been soaked in darkness, he might've had some answer. Some theory. Something more than the shame and the anger and the guilt gnawing him raw from within as black waves closed over his head, and poured into his lungs.

Something more than failure.

What had he accomplished, honestly? (This is what got you here in the first place.) He was a fallen star; nothing but ashes, from which nothing, nothing, could rise.

Three times he had died now. Twice he had risen.

The morning sun burned golden on the mist rising from the fetid pools; roots clung to silt, trying to hold it together, to keep the wide expanse of the ocean at bay. It was early still, the cold clinging to the crisp air further inland. A few hesitant birds trilled.

He was just another body lain to rest in arms of the Marsh, stuck in the debris (driftwood, it's all driftwood, even that pale thing pretending to once have been a horse—) shored up among the grounding roots.

Just another dead.

The minutes ticked by.

Then the wet sound of his breathing started up again.

i am the vanguard of your destruction

Make that three times dead, three times risen.

His black muzzle lay on whatever passed for the ground around here, his neck on the driftwood—the rest of him, in the mud-stained blue of the sea. Part of a shoulder was visible. His mane floating haphazardly on the gently rocking waters.

He was thin. Too thin again. The point of his shoulder jutted accusingly in the light, and while he was not rotted, he was slimy in a way that told he hadn't just spent a few minutes dunked in the sea. It had been much, much longer.

Much longer.

The sound of his life was fragile and sodden; each weak breath rattled wetly, sides contracting in a cough too feeble to achieve anything. His lips were slack. His visible eye half-open. His pulse slow and sluggish, carting around black blood and fucking starlight instead of oxygen—moon-glue keeping him together, when he should've come apart.

He hadn't asked about the finer points of their deal when they'd made it. He certainly wasn't invincible. He wasn't immune to anything. He just couldn't die, some celestial drive kicking in whenever he hit the point where he should've passed on, and keeping him alive through something that tasted far too much like debt and willpower. It repaired him just enough to keep him from being too broken.

He didn't want to tests its limits.

He had cuts, courtesy of the crustaceans trying to eat him. They oozed dark blood and water and some pale, glittering substance. It evaporated quickly, as if shy, or unwilling to admit it was the reason his brain hadn't died and his body decomposed and his latest awake moment had truly been his last, a burst of panic and his lungs and heart exploding as the merciless sea swallowed him and denied him air.

Oh, he was careless. Reckless. He didn't give a shit and that was his problem.

Had his life depended on it, he could've gotten out of the glacier. Had his life depended on it, he could've fought the angry waves and the current.

But it hadn't.

Myrrine's might've, though.

Too late for that.

Are you alive? the voice asked; it fell on deaf ears. The faint sounds of his breathing didn't change. His ears didn't flick. His eye, drying, didn't blink. Mauja! another cried. Still no reaction.

The nudge rolled his head. The snowflake charms clinked against one another. Flashed in the sun before falling back into the tangle of his mane.

Still nothing. (The signal's lost.) Just static on the radio. Bleak imitations of coughs. Wet, impossible breaths into waterlogged lungs.

And those two wet, sad, feathery bundles bobbing on the faint waves next to him.

i am the vanguard of your destruction

A second nose nudged the frigid neck. His head lolled. The snowflake charms came together with another clink, another flash of reflected light. The haze burned over the murky edges of the wetland.

In most ways one could be dead, they were dead. Their minds were dormant; no thought had sparked in them for seasons. Their bodies were twine and rope and fragile sticks for skeletons.

And they were so cold.

It was the warmth that woke her.

The tongue and lips, the hot exhalation, the warm spittle coating her feathers and licking off the salt and sand. She woke, but she did not move. Her eyes did not open. Saltwater took up the space in her lungs. She was afloat in the darkness, adrift, but of all things, unafraid. She knew this silence. She knew the emptiness that was the sleeping minds of Mauja and Diego, and in the void, she heard their heartbeats. That was enough for her. She began to drift away again.

Only, she didn't make it very far. A wave of warmth and light swept through her, and it brought her back, closer to the lights and sounds and smells of the world. The weight in her lungs cleared. The small cuts, below oily feathers, knitted close.

And at last, her eyes opened. By then, Hemlock was gone, and Alysanne was busy fishing Diego from the sea; he hung limp from her mouth, one wing falling open and trailing over the surface.

He looked so dead she had to turn to the sound of his heart in her mind to not panic.

She didn't care that she was supposed to be regal, haughty, and an inconsiderate jerk. She didn't care that she was supposed to be the frigid, hard-to-please lady who spent most of the time reminding Diego that whatever comfort she had offered him—whenever the hell it was, but something had happened and it made them all mopey and Mauja was useless during it—meant nothing.

But fuck that. Diego was her little brother, and seeing him hang limp from Alysanne's mouth broke her heart.

She withdrew into herself. Kept one eye opened. Tried to both watch and rest at the same time.

Mauja lay in his darkness. It was as deep as the sea.

As cold as the blizzards.

He didn't feel the struggle to raise him from the water. He didn't feel the serpentine hands curled around him, the scaly shoulder pushed against him—not the water drying on his already cold skin, as the air sucked the last of the warmth out of him. He didn't feel their gazes, nor the presence of another, as she fell to her knees next to him when he was laid out on firmer ground.

Saving him, when he'd never done anything to deserve it, and least of all from her.

And yet she came, and yet she gave, her voice both soft and powerful as it fell on his skin.

Into his flesh.

Into his blood.

His chest found in itself the power to cough; his inhales the rugged, ragged breathing of the half-drowned sucking in missed air to save his life, now that he had a chance. A mouthful of water, a mouthful of precious air, and with it, the oxygen—his heart picked up speed. The blood going out turned red again. The wheels of his mind started to turn.

(Like floating.)

Up. The heavy weight of something like sleep clung to him. His mind felt ..unwieldy, as if he had been much too drunk the night before. Bit by bit, he became aware again.

And what he felt surprised him. The last he had known, once the panic had come and gone, had been.. falling. Sinking. The light disappearing overhead, and the world turning blue. Then black. Then nothing.

Slowly, he located his body.

It didn't feel like his.

It ached. It felt old. His throat burned as if it had been on fire, and with conscious effort he forced himself to cough again. The water stung like bile on the way up, and most inelegantly, he choked a little on it before going still again.

He was conscious enough to be ashamed. He was conscious enough to know that letting yourself drown wasn't really socially acceptable, because it hurt a lot of feelings and left some questions unanswered, even if he had the annoying habit of coming back to life after his little masochistic, lonely please-notice-me adventures.

He was also unconscious enough to not quite be able to process what went on around him. The world was muffled; it smelled awful and weighed something awful on his head.

Waking up from death always had two questions; how are the owls, and who saved me?

The first one was always easy. Either they were there—asleep, unconscious, whatever, but there—or there was what he could only imagine to be a massive hole yawning wide in your soul.

He had almost let Ophelia kill him once, when he was still mortal. He had almost taken the owls down with him when Tembovu had set him on fire.

They deserved more, and better, than what he had given them.

And everyone else?

He wanted to go back to the sea. Fill his lungs back up again. Fall into oblivion. Into freedom from guilt and shame. Pass into legend, and never be washed up on shore.

That is to say, the easy way out.

Finally, Mauja's blue eyes slid open to a world so bright it quickly forced them closed again. "Ouch," he whispered, so weakly it was barely more than a breath.

He was an idiot. He should've said thanks.