[SOLO] Zodiacal Drabbles

[Amorpheous]

THE TRICKSTER: You tell a lie, but it's okay, because it was a funny lie.

I am a wolf.

She knew this to be true. It was an undeniable truth that she knew deep in her soul. Nothing could convince her otherwise.

At night, when the air was cool and she curled up amongst the roots of the trees, the cicada song drowning out her thought, she could almost make those hooves (not hers) disappear from beneath her, replaced by the paws that she knew were hidden underneath those hard anomalies, so wrong and yet so apparent.

When she was running, the wind blowing through her fur and filling her ears with the rush of blood and air, she could almost feel the hooves on her paws, the scales on her shoulders, back, and face, and the horns on her head disappear. The mud covered the sounds of hooves pounding against ground and the wind displaced all else, filling her senses with their truth.

But in the sun, in the day, in the stillness, she felt all her strange imperfections too clearly. Standing there, eyes too clear, and the sun too hot, the air too wet, and the ground too soft, she could feel all the ways in which she was wrong.

And she wanted to tear herself apart.

So she shook, standing there, feeling less and less like a wolf and more and more like kin though she knew that to be false. She was a packmate, a wolf, a furred creature of the night and the moon, born to run and howl, to press close against her furred brothers and sisters, children on the moon.

At night, when she howled, the sound coming out strange and foreign even to her ears, too much like watersong, Swampsong, to reach the moon, she wondered why she had been abandoned. True Mothermoon was not warmth and invitation, but here her child was crying and yet she was utterly alone.

All she could do was run and repeat the truth:

I am a wolf.

I am a wolf.

IamawolfIamawolfIamawolf.

I am a wolf.

Some days, this truth made her vicious. It made her angry. To see the kin around her, too comfortable in their own skins, greet her as one of her own, made her want to scream at them, made her want to growl and howl her rage for they reminded her of all the ways that was wrong.

Other days, the truth beat her down. It made her tired, weary of living a lie. It made her hate her hooves, her scales, her horns, but it was a tired hate, something slow and simmering that turned her lethargic and slow. It made hide away from the world, as if having no eyes on her would keep her from seeing and feeling herself.

I am a wolf.

That was a truth.

I am a wolf.

That was a lie.

Or at least, sometimes, during the worst of days or the warmest nights. She would whisper it out to herself, and, hearing her voice, she could not help but laugh.

It was funny right?

A wolf with hooves, scales, and horns.

[514 words]  

[Amorpheous]

THE HUNTER: In the dream you turn and see no shadow behind you.

Dreams still cling to her when she walks. She sees through the haze of their light, cold or warm, and the essence of them stays in her bones. It is like she does not quite wake up or, more accurately, waking life does not seem quite so real to her as her dreams do. So she dreams and she dreams, and sometimes she wakes, but the feeling of dreaming remains clear.

She knows dreams. She knows them better than she knows her own life.

•••

Her dreams are true, but they do not come true. They are, perhaps only in the relative state of her being, truths that have already come to pass. They are histories born within and without her mind and consciousness, whispered to her by the Swamp, giving her insight into the world she has been born into, bursting out from a sac with a twin who is not her, but her mirror still.

•••

Maybe the problem with living so fully in dreams is that when you wake, it is like waking for the first time when you are waking from your naming dream: your eyes can’t open for they aren’t ready for the world.

Smoldering Reverie was not ready to live the world of flesh and blood.

•••

Voiceless singing rises, humming in her bones, settling under her skin. She can’t see them clearly from her invisible vantage point, but she can feel them even as the content of the memory, the dream, the history, steals her other senses away from her. They sing and sing, and she listens for that is her role. Even as all vision falls away, she is left with the thrum of voices echoing in the hollow of her chest that holds her smoldering heart.

She walks along a riverbed, no, she was pushed along by forces unknown, the dream drawing her along through the water. It was dream, so she didn’t need to breathe. Then she saw a flash of jaws and teeth. A fish was snatched out of the water. Above it now, and she watches as a doe feeds children not her own, filling their clamoring mouths and hungry bellies.

There is running and fear; she feels it even though she can only stand as kin rush past her. She cannot turn to look, but even she knows, in some heart-deep instinctual place, that danger is coming. They stream past her and she stands watching them. Run, run, run, she feels and her limbs struggle with the need to move against their frozen state. Suddenly, the flames engulf her, burning her way. Now darkness.

Singing in the emptiness, talking, a clamor in her ears. It all feels like nothingness though. This is a void created by sound, filled with sound, made of sound. One of those strands of noise will open up and she will dream again, flung up into the sky, down into the grown, away and away so that she can hear, watch, and feel histories within histories.

She watches, listens, and feels faithfully.

That is her role. She is student, the dreams her teachers.

•••

When she met him for the first time, her bones had ached. It had been the blood that had led her to him because there was something about the bloodlessness of her dream, of that memory, that had drawn her to the scent. It was gentle, yet intensely revealing, pointed even, in a way she had yet to understand, that she had yet to learn.

It had been warm, as many of her dreams were, filled with fire and smoke even in the snow fall.

A beautiful doe, running through the Swamp, black, but green and blue in the moonlight: a mystery. Then stop. Stillness for a caiman rises out of the dark water, also black, but green and blue in the moonlight. Both scaled and dark, both capable of danger, and fear, and terrible violence. They touch noses, their eyes close, and the image is gone, only to be repeated until the fear falls away to curiosity and then into trust so that the feeling of broken bones, of fear, fades away into an empty ache in her bones.

That is the dream that leads her to the blood. Those are the feelings that she has not learned.

•••

The first time she sees him, she almost runs in fear--that was what most kin, in dreams or otherwise, had taught her. Caiman are not to be trusted. However, before she can turn away, their gazes lock, both stuck in their places. She stands there, shivering, but does not run.

Perhaps that is what saves her--she stands her ground, meets his gaze, lets him see her soul. Though she shakes, she does not run and become prey.

When he disappears that time, she thinks that this will be the last time she will see this caiman. Surely, some other kin will crush its skull like she has seen happen a thousand times in dreams long past.

•••

He comes again though, and she wonders if he is following her, deciding if she would make a good meal. He follows her into dreams then, a figment of her waking self, reminding her that she does not belong wholly of that world--an aberration that says This is no longer real.

She is scared, but she does not chase him away.

Eventually, she becomes used to his presence, uncomfortable but there. She talks to him sometimes, when her Eaglehound is away, telling herself that there is no harm in having an audience for her ramblings, no harm in letting another creature know of the kin and familiars that walk her dreams.

•••

One night:

She runs, against her will, these are not her thoughts and her will, yet she feels them and knows them. She stops eventually, in a clearing where the moon, stained blood red, smiles down at her--neither kind nor cruel, simply a matter of inevitability, of fate. A caiman, her caiman she thinks all of a sudden, rises out of the water.

Their eyes meet. She, or some other doe in another life, feels love for this caiman. She trusts this dark creature.

She bends down, her mind flashing to all the times she had touched her cheek to Killing Moon's cheek overlaid with the other doe's memories of affection for a trusted familiar, and touches her nose to the caimans.

•••

The dream haunts her, more than all others she had in the past. She is not brave enough to test her caiman's good will, but she decides to name him: Will Burn Again.

She sees him as a creature of the past after all.

•••

If sometimes she feeds him, it's not because she wants his good will or that she thinks him incapable of hunting. He is simply there and there is meat left over. Better to waste not and offer it instead of simply abandoning it for him to eat.

She doesn't think that meant much, this exchange, the sometimes-maybe companionship. However, one day, when she thought herself alone, he snapped out the water, striking down one of his own when it attacked.

Frozen, she watched the water around them turn red with blood.

•••

She is dreaming again, alone for now, though she knows that soon she will be living another memory as she has always done.

When she turned around, she had no shadow, but there, in its place was a caiman.

•••

When she wakes, she feels the weight of her bones and flesh. He is there beside her and they are not dreaming.

[1265 words]  

[Amorpheous]

THE TWINS: The birds are out and curious despite the cold.

She hadn’t felt like herself since the dream. She was listless and slow. Things that used to give her some measure of joy and amusement had lost their sheen. Now, she walked with an anxiety gripping her heart always, reminding her that there were things unresolved ready to rear their ugly heads and trap her in uncomfortable dreams where everything was out of her control.

She lounged on a warm rock, trying to recapture that lazy feeling of invincibility and detachment where everyone and everything was prey. The day was cold despite the sun and though her rock was warm, everything else held a chill that could not be warded off by the sun’s rays.

The chill in her bones was impervious to all attempts to shake it off. It remained against her will and kept her laying there despite the unnaturalness of it all.

She knew now what it was that she had to face but she was not ready.

She was not afraid, no, she was never afraid, but that did not mean that she could not avoid what she did not want to face. It was the uncertainty. In everything else she had always been sure, but if her very first decision had been rooted in the wrong, then what else of herself could she trust?

No, better to lay here, in the cold and the chill, than to find out. Eventually the sun would have to melt away the chill in her bones and time would fade her memories. It all had to fall way eventually and she would be herself again. Of that she had to be sure. So she closed her eyes to the birds flitting about, safe from her hooves and her teeth because of the cold.

Any other day, any other time when she did not feel how she felt, she would have snapped a few of them out of the air for their stupid curiosity. It was too cold for birds, yet here they were.

She wanted to open her eyes and lash out at them, prove that she was still herself, but she did not have the energy to even open her eyes, let alone leap off her rock and take some of the birds down. A deep sigh and she resigned herself to replaying that dream over and over in her mind, drowning out the bird song. Somehow, she thought if she could see it enough times, it would unravel and become nothing. So she slipped away from the world and into the dream as much as she could, peeling away the layers of her decisions, but what she found was only fear and fear was unacceptable, it was vulnerability.

So she thought of nothing. If she could not even find peace in her own mind, then she resolved to find nothing.

Then a bird landed in front of her, too curious for its own good. She could feel its shivering heat near her nose and she opened her eyes just a touch, just enough to see it considering her with its beady, stupid eyes.

A snap and spray of feathers—

The bird was crushed between her teeth and its friends had scattered in fear.

There, she thought. She could still inspire fear in others even as it gripped her heart.

[552 words]