For falkenna

[tinhuviel]

This came to me on the plane home. I thought you'd enjoy it.


THE BREATHLESS SILENCE

He glanced up from the banquet of blood before him, catching the glint of her eye in the nighttime light of the city.  Somehow, she looked familiar to him, this human child with wide staring eyes, borne of the sea that had not sprayed the coastline for half a millennium.  For what seemed like a sublime infinity, their gazes held each other, pulling one to the other and them both out of the fabric of supposed reality.

He stood to face her, perhaps to kill her if given half the chance.  No one simply happened upon Cadmus Pariah during a feast without becoming a possession or a corpse.  But this one was different.  She couldn’t be a pet and he was too curious to kill her.  He felt the drawing of Kelat upon her, like a tribal tattoo marking this girl as untouchable.  Had he felt the ability, Cadmus would have been infuriated at the predicament in which this left him.  Cocking his head, his eyebrows raised in askance, he said, “What are you, that you should chance upon this without my sensing your presence?  No one since Israel has dared.”

“I’m no one,” she whispered.  “Don’t mind me.  Let me move on and I swear won’t say a word.”

Instantly, Cadmus was against the girl, grasping her by the back of the head, peering into her depths, eyes almost touching eyes.  She stunk of humanity, just like all the others, nothing more than an ape in costume.  But what he saw wrenched a particularly delicious philosophical apex from him.  Surprise?  A great knowing?  He wasn’t certain. 

In her mind’s eye, he saw Magnificat, but it wasn’t Magnificat.  It was some other amazing entourage of artists pulled along and encouraged by an acoustic sorcerer who looked almost exactly like Cadmus.  This one dipped his psychic toes in the darkness, reveling in its wonder and terror…and holy deviance.  And he celebrated with full awareness of the worlds around him, all the esoterics of the mundane and the pedestrian delights of occult poetry he so desired to utter into the ears of those who could truly hear.

And then Cadmus saw the girl child channeling this madness, writing furiously into the shadows of morning, driven by the message and her own communion with the fear and passion it inspired.  He saw her absorbing all of it, taking into her spirit the harvest of this gleeful spirit and making it her own.  But what was it?  What was this creation of spirit and mind and music? 

Delving deeper into her, Cadmus crossed over from philosophical apex to true epiphany.  He wondered at the Truth of things, that perhaps Kelat and Thiyennen were not his parents after all, that indeed he had other progenitors, both intentional and accidental.  Just maybe he was the product of some other force outside his control, probably outside the control of the people who had forged him from the fires of chaos long ago.  Cowled figures standing vigilant at rites of dance and sumptuousness, and dreadfully cold dreamers standing at doorways too terrifying to imagine crossing over their thresholds.  Tribal drumbeats fuelling the frenzy of nightmare, the dark horses that prance the landscapes of blood and sexuality.  The feast of ages, the jungle of the senses.  This is what the Pariah saw.

Cadmus drew away from her.

“You can’t be real,” she rasped, backing away.

“I’m as real as you made me,” he said in a low voice too familiar for comfort.  “Who is the other one?  Should I expect him as well?  And what am I to do with the two of you?  If I dispense with you, do I kill myself in turn?  There’s work to do, great work.  I cannot die.  I will not.  Who is this father?  Tell me.”

She stood silently, unable to utter even a whimper of fright.

“Daft girl.  You should be happy to have the ability to birth such monstrous beauty.  I’m certain on a subconscious level he’s a proud papa, just as you are the beaming mother.  And I am comforted in the knowledge that there’s nothing you can do about my living now.  We’re separate, you and I, just as he and I have been for ages.  You’ve loosed the beast upon Bethlehem and I am gratified by your presence and blessing as I slouch thereon.”

Cadmus Pariah bent down over the still struggling vampire and ripped out his delicate throat, drinking his fill of the Blood.  Some of the gory liquid had splashed across his lips and Cadmus returned to the girl, forcing his mouth upon hers, making her taste the vampiric life.

“It’s not enough to thrall you.  Maybe next time we meet, then?  It’s not every day the child has the chance to enslave the parent.  I’ll save it for when I have more time to savour the experience.  He can expect the same if I ever find him.  Tell him for me.”

With an empty smile that never touched his massive Elfin eyes, Cadmus whisked himself into the night, leaving the human girl standing at the ruined vampire’s corpse, weeping and shattered with realization.

FIN

Comments

[anomali.livejournal.com]

Welcome home, traveller: )

[silent-druid.livejournal.com]

Indeed, welcome back to the land of LJ me dear :D

[falkenna.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[durgablue.livejournal.com]

Tin is home safe and sound, hoorah!