“No other face but hers I could love. I told her so many times. If she wishes to include an homage to our love in the new world, she will have to honor this facet of mine, too.”
—Tidbits of Our Creation, page 5.
Baubles, ancient and gold-threaded, hung from the ceiling of a palace as old as the world itself. Said world lay beyond windows with crystals of many colors, parodies of amethysts, sapphires, rubies, citrines, vermatines and aquamarines. Light, lazy and as varied as the windows it had crossed, bathed the steps upon which feet with four evenly-spaced claws climbed. Black spots embedded in the slightly green, transparent flesh took in a landscape whose finale was, in her opinion, overdue. Solitary in her palace she had waited for many tides already. Now it was Vedala’s stairs she was climbing, turning corners and corners on her ascent only to reach the throne room where her sister slept, in the highest tower, the one that rested directly underneath the Zenith of Concepts, and pointed at it like the merciful finger of the creators elevating from their delicate hand of blue tones, highlighting the means to change the world for a better one.
She didn’t turn to look at the eight arthropod-like legs that sprouted from Vedala’s back, that allowed her to rise despite her legless waist. Yet Shadiran saw them regardless, and Vedala had both her human-like eyes and her composite ones open as she sat upon her tall throne, whose armrests had dents to accommodate the spiderine legs.
“You did not come to visit me, faceless brat?”
The spots on Shadiran’s flesh shifted a little, but her featureless head didn’t leave its tilted-forward position. Her robe made out of metallic beads hung from her shoulders, not a single wrinkle in sight, not a single arm revealed as she stopped out of respect for Vedala.
“Dirofil hasn’t come for me. My interest lies in your balcony,” she said, her tone tinged with sorrow.
Vedala propped herself up on her eight legs and walked over and past Shadiran, lowering her body in front of her, head down. “You think him thoughtless? Your beloved is not so flimsy, Sister.”
Without turning, Shadiran walked a few steps back, and then to the side, to evade her sister and continue her march towards the balcony. “If the sea were anything but ruthless, there would be no end to the torment Lyssav would enact upon us. For your collective good and my disgrace, it is.”
“What if Lyssav is too busy terrorizing her brothers and sister to rise and pay us a visit, Shadi? It may not be the sea that keeps your beloved and our beloathed from coming here.”
“Dirofil knew how to deal with his sister! But the sea…” She kept on approaching the massive, wide open doors of the balcony. “He had no experience with the sea.”
She came out under the warm light of the sky’s core. Placed hands of long rackety fingers upon the glossy balustrade, and took in both the interior and exterior of her sister’s palace with her thousand eyespots. She considered the untarnished sky, the eternally blazing core, the grandeur of her sister’s palace compared to the meager yet cozy image of hers in the distance.
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And the sea. The Retrievers.
No.
The dogs all. Beings of thalassogenic fame and oroclastic cruelty. But weren’t those two merits of water too? To create oceans, to shatter mountains. She didn’t lean forward to get a better look at the ocean below: Shadiran enjoyed no blind spots. The golden pups were a watercolor animation in her eyes. Fires of a hell that Dirofil had to cross to meet her. That Dirofil couldn’t possibly cross.
She could shatter the pain. Tear her core asunder and disperse in the atmosphere of a world to end, in the violet clouds above the Zenith.
Then she did something reserved only for special occasions, and turned her body to face her worried sister, that loomed behind her. The effaced surface where a visage should have been was promptly analyzed by Vedala, and they both kept the silence for a moment.
“I won’t let you jump down, Shadiran,” The spider-legged automaton placed a two-clawed hand on her sister’s chest, over her ribbed core.
“I wonder, Vedala, how do you manage to read this wordless book. To interpret it so flawlessly.”
“A book I spent my whole life learning from the very first to the very last page. Was not I the first thing you saw when you began existing, sister? When your eyespots formed and took in the world so new? Wasn’t my name your second word ever, the first one that wasn’t a question? I love you, Shadiran. I love every single sibling of ours. And I am fond of your beloved, too: If Dirofil thinks no more, cheer is not welcome in this palace.”
Shadiran remained purposefully frozen in place, a gesture that Parvov had found disturbing, and Babesi entertaining, back in the tides before the tides. “If Dirofil thinks no more, my departure is belated. Will you euthanize me if news of his death reach us, sister?”
Vedala closed her eyes and returned a pained shook of her head. “I couldn’t, Shadiran. I love you too much.”
“Or maybe you don’t love me enough.” Shadiran put some distance between herself and her sister, striding to the other end of the balcony. “I won’t jump and let my core explode this tide, return to your seat of fictions,” she dismissed Vedala with a shooing wave of the hands.
“Think about Dirofil finally breaking through, Shadiran. Picture his trembling and mistreated hands finding your lifeless body sprawled in front of my portcullis. Imagine it is you crossing the sea, enduring whatever may lurk deep down there, only to find him thoughtless at the bottom. Not mauled by Lyssav, not savaged by a monstrosity of the depths, but killed by his incapacity to wait for you. You’d think he didn’t love you enough. What are you more in love with: Dirofil, or the absence of your own pain?” She discoursed as she slowly sauntered her way back to her throne.
Shadiran stood in place, paralyzed, leaning against the balustrade, whose stubby tentacles of silver wrapped her fingers and licked among them tirelessly. There she was, at the epicenter of the universe, unknowing that beyond the layers upon layers of dogs, at the other side of the Barrier of Memories, Dirofil was approaching a scared Dobermann, fixated on catching it and taking it back to the only ship traversing Cynothalassa.
No sound left her voicebox, no whisper was born from her soul. Her core was whole, her body still stood. But her mind was already drowning down below. There was no way for her sweet Dirofil to survive the ordeal, not if he was taking so long to reach her. Whatever hid in the sea had taken him, her love, her hope, her world. Gone were the awe at each particle that drifted by, the wonderment at the hue of the sky and the core below, the lust for the new, exciting images that the closure of the sea would bring. Gone were her laughter, her joy, the days where she matched Babesi in energy. Gone were more things than those that remained after the departure of the object of her infatuation. Dirofil. Even thinking of his name brought pangs of anguish, let them nest in her heart.
The only fact among this tumult of unwelcome feelings was that Shadiran, The Husk, carried on, but The Besotted was long dead.