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antheap
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Character(s)/Relationship(s): Original Non-Human Character(s)
Words: 2093
Warnings: Deities, Shapeshifting, POV First Person, Present Tense
I appreciate the intoxicating thrill of gliding and sweeping through the air, the adrenaline of a nosedive when you pull out of it at the last possible moment. I like how, below me, everything is as small as it is insignificant, and even buildings look delicate and ephemeral, one blow away from crumbling. I relish moving around in this wide, limitless expanse that is the sky.
Up high, the small lungs of this tiny body I cram myself into breathe the air in eagerly, hungry for oxygen, and my head feels light. The wind lashes against the cavities of my ears; its untamed whips whistle through my feathers so loudly that I almost find it difficult to hear anything else. The chilly air seems to perspire through this temporary form of mine, right to the bones and then further inside, reaching out and cooling down the core I hide beneath it.
Living bodies have all these stimuli, fireworks of nerves and hormones, low electricity running through them at all times, all kinds of feelings and sensations that I usually find a thrilling, adrenalinic deviation from my customary dull state of being. But, for the first time now, I find myself appreciating the diversion, rather than the refreshing change they provide.
My thoughts are thin red lines, precise, accurate strokes colouring the canvas of my soul in a way that I can’t seem to alter, no matter how I struggle. They chase each other, touch each other, scatter around then converge together, and the picture they’re drawing is not one I want to look at. This body’s reactions provide a distraction, and I divert my gaze to it, focus on it.
I flap my wings, fold them to my sides, and head towards the ground, dropping in height as fast as I can. I close my eyes and let myself fall down. The wind screams into my ears as if it’s telling me to stop, but I’m not scared. Nothing scares me, nothing moves me, nothing excites me. This tiny heart of mine pumps the blood in my veins with unrelenting fury. I can almost feel the cells in my brain fire up at each signal from the nerves. But it’s not enough to keep the thought away.
When everything is predictable, when everything is known, waiting becomes a constant state of being. I’ve spent my life watching things happen, knowing that they would and when they would. It’s boring, but it's comfortable. I never knew how uncertainty could make my insides boil and foam, agitate restlessly, convulse violently to the point I struggle to keep the integrity of my disguise.
Then I saw Aion’s essence pulsate around him, alive fumes steaming out of his body, writhing, blowing out suddenly, without an exact form, without order. I saw him change into many disguises, humans of every sex, height and colour, animals out of a dream or a terrifying nightmare. I saw him smile and laugh when I threatened him, turn his back to me without the smallest hint of fear, try to reach out for my core as if I’d ever let him anywhere near it.
Aion is an unknown variable, unpredictable, incalculable. I never know when I’ll see him next, nor if I will. I never know what he wants, what he’s thinking, what he’s doing, where he’s going. My whole soul grows hot and restless when I realise I want to see him, I need to see him, I need to talk to him. There’s a force I can’t resist, pulling my essence in every direction in the desperate search for him. I need him to explain what happened, because I know he's the key to this sudden change, the one who understands how the echo of each of our meetings ripples through the fabric of time itself.
I put a stop to my fall. The sudden change of direction sucks the air out of my lungs. Keeping myself into this form is more difficult than ever when my soul feels like a mass of boiling, seething molten lava, but it's good that the effort occupies my thoughts. I focus on it to avoid thinking about the fact that it could be decades before I see him again.
I land softly on human feet. The blow of wind that ruffles my hair still light as feathers smells like putrefying flowers and artificial scents, but none of them is enough to cover the overwhelming odour of decaying bodies that seeps through the walls of the building in front of me. Modern cemeteries are pale shrines of concrete and alabaster, immobile monuments to the way men lost their contact with an Earth they once called their Mother.
I walk up the marble stairs, semi-translucent white with thin black veinings like wrinkles, and the intended sense of grandeur is lost on me, consumed by the opulence of greek limestone. A long time ago, temples used to be like homes to their Gods, built out of adoration and love; if anything, this building was built out of fear. It reeks of dread, the one thing that humans, Gods, demons and angels all have in common when they recognise me.
I feel his presence before I see him, and I stay hidden, in silence. He's standing in the middle of this forlorn hall, the only speck of colour in the room, except for the compositions of dead flowers next to most headstones. He walks up to one of the bare ones and carefully adorns it with his own dead tributes: white cyclamens and orange gerberas, the prettiest bunch of flowers in here. Next to them, the picture of a girl, hair orange like the gerberas that died for her.
The sound of my shoes on the floor resonates in the hall when I step out of hiding. I don't give him the time to turn around and see me. One boy snapping his fingers is enough for his form to unfold, for the garment of his soul to unweave at the pulling of the right thread. My designated victim collapses to the ground lightly like one of my pitch black feathers; his dark form touches the floor without weight, with a thud that goes unheard. He must have felt my arrival and I wonder why he chose a place like this to die. The smell in here is sickening.
His soul still tastes like the last person he devoured. It feels like biting a soft dough, teeth sinking into mint cream. Behind it, his own taste is devoid of the sugary aroma of struggle, albeit crunchy with the blind anger and wicked malice of his kind. Inside the crisp crust, something soft like sponge cake surprises me. It tastes of wine, strawberries and sunny days. Its mawkish taste leaves me nauseated.
I never liked demons. They're a heap of uncontrolled feelings, paranormal in nature and yet undeniably human in character. They elude my understanding, shadows dancing on the edge between their crude, disjointed brand of humanity and an undignified kind of godliness and, sometimes, they lose to one side or the other. And yet, today, I see their reckless tendency to self-abandonment with different eyes. As I stare at the body of the one I killed, burning into a pile of ash thin like air, it’s like looking into a mirror.
From inside that pile of embers, my own eyes look back at me, full of pity.
My hair flutters in the wind for a moment when I turn my back to that pathetic sight and, step after step, I put some distance between us. My thoughts wander back, they touch the image of a demon bringing flowers to a dead girl: something inside me crackles pleasantly, something else shivers in an insubstantial breeze. I leave it all behind and walk out of the building.
“You wanted to talk to me?”
Aion’s thought reaches me together with the baritone of his voice as soon as my foot touches the first step of the marble flight of stairs. I turn towards him and, for a moment, I’m on the verge of staggering and my whole being is washed, cleaned from all my recent concerns. Taking me by surprise sends a quivering wave through the fog always steaming from Aion’s body and paints a satisfied little smirk on his pink lips. His fruity smell travels to my nose on a whiff of wind messing up his short hair. I don’t have to raise my head as much as usual to see the wheat field of beard on his face, nor to meet his eyes dark like the bottom of a lake.
I nod and my whole essence shakes in unrest, it seethes while I search inside my mind for the words I need to form a clear thought, to ask him the questions I need him to answer. The thin fingers of his hand closing around my wrist come unexpectedly, and it takes me a moment to rebel against his grip. When I slip away from it, I’m not in the same place anymore.
Around me there's green grass as far as the eye can see and tall rocks reaching for the sky, lichens climbing up their sides with stubborn tenacity. Aion is already sitting in the shadow of one of the rocks, his back resting against a cushion of moss, his eyelids closed against the dark teal of his eyes. The fog around him moves slowly and rhythmically, as if it's breathing, and it's barely disturbed by me approaching.
“Why such an inhospitable place?” I ask, and my words become breath’s mist scattered around by the wind.
“It reminds me of home.”
I look around. The pale sky is turning orange, soft clouds like apricots and peaches, and it's like the whole expanse of grass changes its colour, golden shades painting over all that green. Gooseflesh appears on my skin when the salty wind kisses it. Just a couple of metres from Aion, a cliff ends in sharp boulders, down into the deep blue ocean all around us, and the lulling sound of its waves travels up here, carried by the breeze. A bit like him, this place feels out of time.
“Your home looks like this?” I ask.
His eyes are still closed and his body unmoving, but the grey fumes around him ripple towards me, and if they had eyes they would be staring into my soul.
“No,” he sighs, “but it feels a lot like this.”
I close my eyes as well and let myself reach out outside of my body, just for a moment. I want to understand the sensations familiar to him but, instead, I feel nothing but his presence right next to me, immersed into dull nothingness. This place is just like deep space, where there’s no air, no matter for sound to vibrate through, and he’s like a lonely, bright dwarf star.
To me, he appears as a weightless presence floating in the void, but when he reaches out for me his touch has the density of a neutron star and I promptly shy away from it. He lets out a puff of steam, then backs away and just stays there, at the edge of my perception. He feels like a predator hiding from his prey, but he’s a failed hunter and I’m not anyone’s victim.
“You wanted something?” His voice embraces me softly and brings me back into focus, into my body, into the material world. I draw myself back in, regain my control. When I start seeing like a human again, he’s staring at me through half-lidded eyes.
“I wanted to talk to you,” I explain.
“About?” He looks away towards the ocean, but his aura is obstinately focused on me. He emanates a sweet-smelling ataraxia, a cheerful background buzzing. My thoughts seem to take form spontaneously and they leave my mind in a slow, creepy melody.
“Did you do something to me?”
It’s a curious question for me as much as it is for him, I bet. He massages his hairy chin, takes a deep breath and then sighs, the vapour of his breath floating in the dusky sky. When he looks at me, standing there in an unnatural stillness, his eyes have something unwelcoming about them.
“What do you mean?”
I struggle to explain it with words, so instead I show him — I send the thoughts into his mind through the undisturbed ether around us. I show him how the world looks through my eyes, a series of labels with an expiry date, and how one day I looked at my own and it had changed. Years, decades added to it while I wasn’t looking, as if someone cheated, defrauded me of my own death.
“And you think it’s because of me?” His words interrupt my flow of thoughts and I cut him off, sucking them back in. I make one step towards him, not enough for any part of us to touch — he’s obsessed with touches, but they’re like lightning striking a tree, opening up the wood grain into ash veinings, trying to set it on fire, and if he’s a stubborn fresh bud that doesn’t want to hear a thing about burning down, I’m a dry and old stump wishing for a better end.
“You’re the only anomaly,” I explain.
“That you know of.” The fog around him vibrates restlessly and I stare into his eyes. I let a small part of my soul reach out for him — almost brush against him, stopping a whiff away from the perturbed mist of his soul. I know he understands I’m not here to be lied to before I even try to voice the warning.
His lips tense in a smile of sharp edges and bright teeth, and for a moment he looks like the bottom of that cliff, ready to devour anyone reckless enough to throw themselves down and hide their corpse in the unforgiving ocean.
“What? Are you implying that our meeting changed your destiny?”
The words that leave my lips after that are met with a click of his tongue, and I turn away, ready to leave this place reeking of loneliness and his detestable narcissism.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”