[attr="class","lvappbody2"]

[attr="class","lvappbody3"]

[break][break]

the story does not begin with you: it begins with the chimera. three heads painted red; their names are rosanna, areli, and aeris. they are of old blood, haunting, nightmarish, wraiths in the shadows -- they are not seen, yet, they are powerful. no one doubts that. [break][break]

the first to fall is areli, and so the ram is felled, swallowed by the very seas that roared at his beck and call, then rosanna. the lioness goes down in a blaze of glory, a hurricane at her fingertips, plummeting through the air like a gold-plated icarus.[break][break]

the dragon retreats into the fire. the youngest of the three, he sheds the name, the mantle, gathers the broken jagged shards of his family before they fall prey to the hunters once more. ( deirdre has different ideas, she burns with star-bright brilliance, and ventures into the hall of bellephoron himself. it is only after, after, that he tells his son, still too young to comprehend: the stars died so that you could be here today. )[break][break]

they are of old blood, haunting, nightmarish, wraiths in the shadows -- they are not seen, yet, they are powerful. or, they were.[break][break]

you spend new years’ standing over an empty grave, under the moon, to the sea sound flowing like blood from a loud wound. a storm breaks on the horizon, the voices of all drowned howling in the wind. listen closer: the scratch of claws against stone. her grave hangs at the edge of a cliff; you note gravity’s prick like a thorn in your heel, and your shoulder blades hurt from the imperative of wings.[break][break]

she leaves you with nothing more than a leather-bound journal -- secrets carved into a well-worn spine ( legacy etched into the vertebrae of your backbone ), spilling from black ink. the last page is unfinished: a scatter of tenebrous stardust, like flies settling around a corpse.[break][break]

you had never known her very well, but it aches all the same. at twenty-two you desperately drown yourself in what writing you can decipher, praying that it brings back something more concrete than the faintest memory of a mother's smile, or the embers of the forge-fire as her and aeris talk. but you can remember how she had left on a promise to stay alive ( and you pray ), and how your father would fret over every small word that arrived of her.[break][break]

and, of course, you remember how the new year had broken its fucking promise about keeping her alive.[break][break]

"i miss her," you say, eyes never lifting from the gravestone, and your father sighs his reply.[break][break]

"i miss her too."[break][break]

so you follow the words of ghosts long gone, alongside a brother who quests for fragments that linger out of reach; you learn atheneum. you learn that your father’s favourite colour is pink, and that he enjoys reading crime fiction. you learn that your handwriting looks better coalesced into threads of blue-green energy; it’s actually legible this time. you learn that it’s much easier to store your favourite recipes in the interface instead of looking for that yellow-paged cookbook, which is, for some reason, never actually in the kitchen. you learn that, with her last words, your mother says, si vis pacem, para bellum. the words bleed red.[break][break]

[break][break]

and later, dawn breaks across the sky, a jagged broken bone; air reeking of rain, skin sticky with it, with a bloodstain that you can’t wash off. the long war has long ended, its miseries faded, but the spine remembers the swords, the wings. you slip the knife back into your belt and take the long way home, just as the rain begins once more.[break][break]