my kindler of wildfires:
Posted by gld. Ilium on March 31, 2009, 12:36 pm
64.13.13.50
- She rests in the desert. After their trek to visit Hypatia, her children are bone-weary; they sprawl flat out on the sand, back to back, one pale gold and the other stark black against white. Ilium watches over them with a mother's keen attention, motionless in the cool wind, slender threads of lightning curling around the vines that twine in her mane. She considers the mountains, the sands, each her home in some way but neither satisfying. Is there something wrong, that she cannot seem to be content with one or the other, that she cannot bear to think of the desert as a place to raise her children and yet the mountains are not quite right -- and, yet --
- She sighs, and suddenly her gaze settles on a dusty approaching figure. Knowledge strikes her to the bone, and the desert wind tears words from her lips, until at last she cries "Anatole!" He is close now, and she ranges only strides from her children, burying her head in his mane uninvited, eyes closed against the pain of her betrayal. Betrayal. "Love," she says, quietly, "I need to talk to you -- Betrayal, and --" she steps back, worried green eyes scanning his face, and notices only then the slender scar on his shoulder that mirrors her own. Awakened by their mother's distress, Iahhel and Excelsior wobble to her side and stare at the buckskin stranger. "I'm sorry," she finishes, ashamed.
- Then, comes the beginning of the end. Ilium feels the elements scream, and her Earth and Lightning are choked with pain and terrible knowledge, though of what she cannot say. The foals cling trembling to her flanks, and she stares at Anatole, uncomprehending of this end of days. "What is happening?" For the first time in a long time, true fear lights her expression, borne only of her fierce love for her children. It is as if everything she has known inside of her, the Earth present from her birth and later the fitful Lightning, is screaming in agony, is dying. The heat grows. "We need to run," she murmurs, and she turns abruptly into a rocky Golem. "Run," she snaps at her tiny, weak children, and they do, two terrified forms glued to each other as they streak across the rising heat ahead of her.
- "Come with us," she begs her lover, her beloved. "Come with me. Please."
Slowly, savagely, the Desert begins to burn.
ILIUM
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness:
All these I place
between myself and the powers of darkness.
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