Twilight is a threshold: as Midsummer and Midwinter, as any point of ingress and egress, as birth, as death. Strange things happen at twilight. The Veil thins. There are tricks of the eye in the half-dark, shapes that dance at the edge of vision.
That's the importance of cycles, see. At the beginning and the end, at the high and low, there is unity in creation. It becomes divine.
Nicholas has of course chosen this hour on purpose, and he has gone far and climbed high. He has not eaten all the day, sustained himself with lemon water since the time he woke up early this morning as the sun was on the rise. He told his wife where he was going and left her to her own studies and her metalwork and her swordplay before making the journey and then the ascent up the mountain.
He has come this way following a mountain stream, following it back up to its origin, to the point at which the ground aquifer beneath the mountain birthed it from snowmelt and stone. It has taken him most of the day. He was careful in planning how long it would take so that he would arrive here now, at this point: he knows the way the Wheel turns, Nicholas. He knew the Time at which he would arrive.
He is arrived: and of course he is exhausted. His boots are hanging by their laces from his backpack, which holds only more water and a filter and his phone and a pair of warm socks. He went along the riverbed on foot: his feet are bloody. He knew they would be, and his steps are still ginger. His muscles ache.
It's the sort of weariness that would welcome death if only for a moment's respite.
So when he arrives it is at an overlook, still below the tree line and there is a lonely fir out here with him, a sentinel that one day in the future may be taken by lightning. But not yet.
First he stands at the overlook, and he draws in a breath and he must draw it deep because here the air is thin. Here, too, is a threshold.
twilight
There is no one else around. There has been noone else around for hours.
That does not mean that he is alone.
Not long after he started on this climb, he had a sense that he was being: watched, shadowed, tracked. A certain rustling of the aspens, a shiver of the grass. The sudden, reckless surge of a rangy little jackrabbit right across his path. He lost this shadow during the heat of midday, and was as close to alone as one could be, after. The rasp of his breath, the strange, almost hallucinatory awareness from his fast. The blood-laced footprints he left in his wake.
Now: twilight.
High above, some great-winged bird circles. Its shadow slung out over the ascetic landscape. It is a dry high summer in the eastern range of the Rockies, here at the edge of the high plains. The flush of green traces the course of that mountain stream right down the mountain, and only just.
His heart pounds. Strange the way he feels it, hmmm? The root of his tongue, the tips of his fingers. The oceanic rhythm in his ears. Twilight. Shadow fills the hollows and deep valleys first, and then starts to rise.
Nick hears the rhythm of footsteps approaching from: behind and above.
Perhaps he is not alone, after all.
crow
Sound and sensation are almost unbearably loud to him now, amplified as they are by the silence and by his hunger and by his bone-weariness. Blood wells where it's drawn, and swells and reddens the skin, and so each brush of his toes against stone is an agony.
This is a truth, that pain: clarifies. It can also muddy, depending on one's perspective, depending on how one is inclined to view the almost hallucinatory awareness he has just now.
The rhythm of footsteps eats at the edge of his perception, until he straightens, rocks on an unsteady leg and turns his head toward the sound. He has not been alone for a long while, and he has known this. He never is, and he knows this: spirits accompany him often, his Avatar lingers just past his range of vision and sometimes will appear to him in his waking hours, perched as a raven on the shower rail or as a wild-haired dark-eyed old woman on the street or some ivy-headed old god without a name.
Old things don't always have names. They don't always have a single shape.
Nicholas sinks down to his haunches, which leads into him sitting cross legged, his spine aligned with heaven and earth, a lightning rod just as the tree would be. His head lifts and he watches the bird circle.
And he breathes: in. out. nascence. absence. This, too, a cycle.
twilight
The sound is shaped and shadowed and shifted. Moving. There is an echo here, a trick of the ribs of rock, the bones of the earth. The peculiar eruptions, the contortions, the goddamned striving of these ridiculously young mountains.
--
She is heralded by a long, thin shadow, made inhuman, made grotesque even, by the hummock of a pack on her back. His first impression may be of one of the more obscure iterations of some god of transfiguration, caught between one self and the other.
That is the shadow upon the stone. When he looks up, he sees descending towards him from the ridgeline a young woman - dark haired, dark eyed - in cargo shorts and a t-shirt and a North Face jacket, both hands wrapped around the straps of her backpack. A pair of collapsible hiking poles sticking up from the hummocky mass like strange antennae.
"Hey. You okay?"
crow
Ahead of him there is a ridge of rock, sweeping toward the sky like the knobs of a jagged spine, like crooked teeth, and then descending again. Nick's eyes trace the skyline.
It is flatter, in Arizona, all tall red mesas and broken rock. The slopes are far gentler in New England: older, ground down to stumps, without the arrogance and energy of youth. It is unfamiliar in a way that makes his heart beat faster because he cannot recall a landscape like this before, not in all his lives not in all his gods. And novelty: it's an unusual thing in a person who has lived a thousand lifetimes and can recall snatches of many of them.
The young woman's shadow falls across him and he notices this first, how it is stretched and warped by the twilight.
Involuntarily and without apparent trigger, his stomach rumbles.
Nick turns to look at her now and he must look half mad, mustn't he, with his thick dark spirals of hair and his eyes almost amber in the dim light, his feet bloody and the cuffs of his pants dampened with river water and mud, his lips dry no matter how well he has remained hydrated this long way up the mountain. He blinks at her once and twice, trying to determine whether she is real or More-Than-Real, and: he cannot.
"Yes," he says, and maybe it's because he says it without wavering that it is unsettling. Any common human being would answer with less certainty even if they wanted to be here this way, wouldn't they? "I'm all right. But thanks."
twilight
Real or more-than-real, she offers him no clues.
Well, her boots are worn and her feet are not silent and the sweat that limns her face gleams just so in the fading light and there is something about the way her body moves - shoulders forward in the harness of the back, her head ever-so-slightly bowed, the rasp of her breath - that speaks of a day's long exertions. Her care, too, on the rocky slope as she watches him and picks her way down, now and then sending scree skittering over the edge of some inconvenient, toothsome cliff.
She is not waived off by his confident assurance of choice: of okay-ness. Whatever that is.
Maybe it is late. Maybe she is lonely. Hasn't heard another voice in a day or an age.
Maybe this is what one does, when one meets a stranger at a crossroads, marked by rag and marked by bone and marked by blood.
Maybe she just wants to refill her canteen in that spring.
--
She comes up beside him, not so close as to be crowding, but close enough that he can smell the last dregs of sunlight in her hair and the sweat against her skin, dusty and golden, all-at-once. Though she does not take off her pack after she has refilled her water bottles, she does undo straps that anchor its weight across her torso. Leans back to let the mountain take the brunt of the load. Roots around in the front pocket of her jacket for the crumbly remnants of a granola bar.
The wrapper crinkles as she opens it, pulls it back. Dumps out the crumbs into her cupped hands.
Offers him a handful of granola crumbs, if he'd like. Does this: wordlessly.
Some nameless hum in the back of her throat.
crow
It is grown late, and perhaps the woman is lonely or perhaps she is lost and there is concern that she will be left out here alone with it growing dark. Out this far there are mountain lions and bears, and out this far there isn't much of a trail to speak of. Nicholas found his way here by following the river and he can find his way back using a trick of Space and the keys to his car and a strand of his wife's hair, if need be.
There is sharp awareness now of another human being beside him, of the remnants of day and the earthy smell of sweat. He, too, probably smells like that: dust and metal and sun baked cloth.
When she offers him a handful of granola he only shakes his head and says, "I'm all right," once more and then "Thanks," again. He does unscrew the cap of his water bottle and takes a long swallow from it, long enough to make his stomach think it is full of something even if that something will be revealed to be water before long.
There is a hum at the back of her throat, and a rasp still in the back of his. He lets his eyes fall again on the skyline, and again the measured breath before he asks her, "Are you going back down?"
twilight
"No," she says. Quick, sharp shake of her head. The ghost of a smile coursing across her mouth.
Laughter that is bound, quiet. Withheld, or so it seems, in the strangest of ways. "I'm in for the long haul. And having gotten this high, I don't feel like going down, just yet."
Glimpse, sidelong. Her profile, etched out against the growing dark.
"You?"
crow
The dark is a backdrop for Nicholas, whose hair seems to have drowned itself in starlight. Here and there the edge of a curl gleams, amidst the swirling pools of black. One of his wife's nicknames for him (champion nicknamer, she) translates to: Night-Illuminated, one of the names for Dionysos, and so he is.
He looks at her as the laughter chases the smile out her throat and his eyes are the deep amber of dying coals, of the last gasp of a bonfire as it ushers in the second half of the year, the drawing down at midsummer. Nick takes another swallow from his water bottle. "I'll be up here until I find what I'm looking for," he says.
If his gaze lingers, perhaps it's because she reminds him of someone. Then again, what does that mean, to someone who knows he has lived a thousand times?
"Did you follow me up here?"
twilight
"No."
Again the edge of a smile. The curve of a cheek, some gleam against the darkness: a certain shape that belongs to a certain sort of deity. Sickles and crowns made of crescent moons.
And yet she seems entirely physical. Pollen, dust. Sweat on her skin. Bit of a rasp in her voice. The air is thin and raw and dry, all the way up here.
"Made my own way. Maybe it's just happenstance. What is it you're looking for?"
crow
It is not so very long ago now that Nick might have struggled to answer this question: understanding what others want is and has always been far easier for him than understanding what he wants for himself. It is the rallying cry of every sensitive child raised by a narcissist the world over, and in this he has remained something of a child, undefined and questant, still.
It has become easier, and nonetheless he has to think. He says, "Understanding. And connection," and there is a thoughtful glance down to his feet which were blistered and battered by the meeting of air and flesh and stone. And if this were an older story, if Nick were just a little more given to archaic or poetic speech (or simple pretension) perhaps he would have said only: Wisdom.
There is a span of heartbeats before he adds, "And the strength to receive it," which could sound as though it is an afterthought. It isn't:
The pain is never in the ending itself, but in the preparation, and in the beginning again. Know that it hurts to be born.
twilight
She breathes out altogether. Rush of air like a sigh, or perhaps banked laughter. Something in the middle, in between them, that does not have or perhaps even refuses singular definition. The sun has fallen fractionally closer to the horizon. Or the horizon has come fractionally closer to the sun.
Or Helios is directing his fiery team toward their stable beyond any ken. All a matter of perspective.
"That," she tells him, "is an awful lot to find in just one hike. What if you have to wait longer than you imagine? Not a day or a week, but a lifetime? What if you have to give one up for the other? Which would you choose?"
"Or what if you wait. And you wait. And you wait - and nothing ever comes?"
crow
Nick tilts his head now, and they are high and at a precipice and there is enough wind here to tug his curls off toward the rising night. The breeze is welcome, scouring away sweat and leaving him only grave dust and rag and blood. He must have thought about this: what would happen if he came all the way up here and there was nothing for him. He must have thought this because superhumans are still human, and humans doubt.
That is not the way it happens, in stories. In stories when people go up into the mountains, when they go questing, they are led by an animal or vision, there is something to chase, something to do. Of course: it is difficult to make a nothing into a story, and so reality is biased.
His toes ache, and so he wiggles them, and even the sharp pain is a relief from the throbbing it took the place of.
"I suppose I'd head back down and try again later," he says. "I have a life to go back to." No ascetic to live out his life on a mountaintop, is Nick. "I suppose a lifetime would be a short time to wait, all things considered."
twilight
There are several beats of silence, after. The glory of the sunset, somewhere. The coil of twilight. The crawl of shadow in the valleys and all that impossible light in the sky above. The charge in the air, the change in it. That sense of relentless space.
--
Then the girl is rising. Kind of a heave-ho that. Stiff from the inactivity. Takes the straps that distribute the load of her small pack and refastens them across her torso.
"Well," so she says. "I hope you find what you seek. Whether you have to wait a lifetime or an hour."
"Here, humor me." Reaches down to one of the pockets of her cargo shorts. Unbuttons it. Pulls something out that she offers to him - at a glance, it looks like an unopened version of the granola bar she tried to share with him earlier. "Just in case."
crow
Just in case.
They were sitting in silence for a little while, and this is comfortable for Nick: he meditates daily, even if it is only for a little while. It allows him to lose himself in the sound of the world, in its heartbeat, in the flesh and muscle wound about his bones.
When she extends the granola bar toward him he looks up at her, into her face, and smiles at her as he reaches forward to take it. "Thanks," he says, as he accepts it into his hand. "For that and for your words."
He could, after all, be waiting for a very long time.
What have you been waiting for, and you are still waiting for now? Robin Anton's long-ago words come back to him unbidden. He had said then: Courage.
Now, he is not sure.
twilight
Another flash: her mouth and its curve, which is somehow equal parts tender and sharp, as if the essence of tender and sharp could be layered into the self-same space.
And perhaps it is no more than a trick of the failing twilight, the skim of sky and horizon, the breathlessness of the elevation, but when she looks down at him, her eyes are entirely dark but for the smallest scatterpoints of light, like a sprinkling of stars.
The granola bar, though: real enough. The wrapper crinkles in his hand.
By the time he registers this, she's back on the trail, climbing easily, effortlessly up the steep scree-strewn slope to the knife edge of the ridge above.
In a moment or two, she will disappear from view.
crow
When Nicholas has seen his guide in the past she (it is often she) rarely takes the same shape twice: what takes more forms in the human consciousness than Death, and mystery, and wonder? He has seen crows and shrouded women and men and bloody-eyed women at fords and blue-lipped young women, he has seen young curly-headed men not so different from himself in appearance crowned in ivy, he once saw a white raven.
So he had suspected from the moment she sat down beside him, and when her eyes grow dark his breath catches in his chest in spite of himself.
He does not call after her. He looks down at the wrapped bar in his hand, and he wishes he had asked for guidance. Nicholas like the fatherless and motherless the world over, lost children regardless of how we should define that loss, has often wished throughout his life for guidance. (He has learned, too, that there are no answers to the questions he is asking.)
Nick watches her as she disappears from view, and he wiggles his torn and bloodied toes once more. It is in preparation, though he doesn't realize it is in preparation yet.
Then he does exactly the thing his body is begging him not to do, and rises. There is a wince, and he holds his stiffened muscles rigid for a moment before they adjust; it will take them a little while to limber themselves again. And he heads toward the ridge above.
crow
[Stamina + Athletics!]
Dice: 3 d10 TN8 (2, 5, 5) ( fail )
crow
[Reroll, with willpower.]
Dice: 3 d10 TN9 (1, 6, 10) ( success x 2 ) [WP]
crow
[Perception + Awareness, specialty Astute]
Dice: 7 d10 TN8 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) ( botch x 1 ) [Doubling Tens]
twilight
She climbs that slope effortlessly. Leaves behind the scent of attar of roses, red clay, myrhh and human sweat lingering in the air, braided together but slowly disintegrating back into their component parts. He doesn't know that he is rising to follow, until: he does. Until he flexes his stiff muscles and his bloodied feet and rises and it hurts, every part of his too-human body is protesting movement, the slope here is steeper than he understood and at first he simply cannot: make it up.
And then he does. Redoubles his efforts and focuses his will and pushes through. This is a hard-won scrabble, and the slope is steep enough that he should probably be decked out in safety gear. Anchored to something at least. With something other than bare hand and bare, blooded feet, but here he is. Reaches the ridgeline just as the last sliver of sun sinks below the horizon. Light still is backed in the sky, yes: but now down here all is dark. Even the peaks that had been bathed in rosy light are now swathed in murky shadow. There are no stars, yet, in the sky.
No moon.
Just the suggestive glow at the edge of the horizon.
--
If he was on the trail of the young woman, well: by the time he climbs to the top of the ridge, she is no longer in view. The ridge rises to his left, falls slightly to his right, edged on the other side by what seems to be a remarkably sheer drop, lost in shadow below.
crow
The young woman is no longer in view by the time he reaches the top of the ridge, and he has had to push his body to even arrive here. His movements have grown more sure and his body more nimble in Denver, with his outdoor adventures growing more and more daring by the week, and maybe that is all that saves him. Maybe he shouldn't even be here at all: this is a high place and a lonely one, and were he to fall it could go unnoticed for hours. Days, even.
Pen would know how to find him, how to track him with a twist of his hair and her own skill: but the power of even a Hermetic is limited with some things.
And so there is that niggling thought in the back of his head as he tears a toenail on the rock, hisses and finally makes it to the top. And on the other side of him is this cliff, and the way down is dark and darker. So here Nick stops, and he glances down, and his breaths are swelling his chest with each intake of air in a way that hurts, all the way down at the bottom of his lungs.
The ridge rises to his left, and he glances up. He grimaces and lets his forehead fall against the rock, though only briefly: long enough for his body to catch up with his heart. And he looks for a handhold.
twilight
He must know by now that the entirety of the landscape he has entered is as figurative as it is physical, and yet as he crests the slope and finds himself standing high atop the shoulder of that ridge - one cliff falling away into fathomless darkness, the other a steep, murky, scree-covered slopes in the direction from which he came - he has not a whit of sense about the next step. The low-humming awareness, his keen and finely tuned senses offer no hint as to the way-forward.
She is gone, or so it seems.
Vanished into that sea of darkness.
And here he is: right? Following. The ridge runs this way and that. Vaguely north-south, if the last shreds of sun in the sky can be trusted, and indeed if north and south have any more meaning in this world. He takes: the left-hand path, which rises for thirty or forty barren, rocky meters, plateaus briefly, and then curves down.
Call it: undulant.
No suggestion of a destination in sight.
crow
His backpack is beginning to feel heavy on his shoulders, to weigh like a stone on his lower back. He slides his thumbs down under the straps once or twice to redistribute the weight, but it is to no avail. Hiking backpacks are comfortable to wear for a while: that's part of the point. But even then.
He cannot tell where she has gone, and he has lost all his bearings. He must know that by now this landscape is figurative, mustn't he?
He has lost himself in such places before, a long time ago.
Nicholas wanders down the end of the ridge, and his eyes seek for some sign of what he's lost. Some wayward footprint (spirits and ghosts and Avatars don't make footprints; the footfalls of Nicholas himself are silent things) or some glimpse of someone's head or even of a bird that would be familiar to him
and there is nothing. He does not know what to do: and so he walks, with his head bowed and with as much calm acceptance as he can muster of the stones against his feet, how the merest brush is an agony.
[Stamina!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (2, 6) ( success x 1 )
twilight
?
Dice: 1 d10 TN6 (7) ( success x 1 )
crow
[So many stamina. So many.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (4, 6) ( success x 1 )
crow
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (1, 6) ( success x 1 )
crow
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (2, 8) ( success x 1 )
crow
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (2, 2) ( fail )
crow
[Using WP to keep going.]
twilight
An hour passes.
Two.
Three.
This is not a weekend stroll: he leaves behind a trail of bloodied footprints that seem to disappear even as he looks back, if he ever looks back. Eroded by some invisible tide. He has the wind of course: the suggestion of it, the harsh rasp of his own breath, he own beating heart, and little else to guide him.
Darkness has long since engulfed the ridge. The suggestion of stars as distant and disinterested pinpoints of light: at the horizon, or perhaps across the bowl of the sky. Not the stars from our world, full of implicit promise, wonder, drive. These are far too distant.
On and on he goes, without question and without fail - until fail he does. Stumbles. Falls. No goal in sight, no reason to go on. Except -
crow
He walks, and he walks, and the ridge is endless.
This is perhaps the most desolate place he has ever been, physically, at length. Nicholas grew up in some tumbledown house on the outskirts of Phoenix, grew familiar with the desert: this is not the same as walking it, with no house and no car nearby and no respite. He wonders where he is going, and Nick knows his eyes are sharp and so he trusts in them and so for a little while it does not occur to him to doubt his course.
He wonders, see, whether he is being tested and that is all, whether this is a challenge of his willingness to bear suffering, to bear doubt.
But he continues long enough, and there is doubt. Some uncertainty there, some wondering of whether he has been overconfident. And then for a few steps he continues out of fear: should he turn back around and risk being wrong in doing so, what if he has only a few more steps to go before finding answers? He is just beginning to think in earnest of turning around when his knee gives.
It surprises him.
But it gives beneath him and his limbs are too wobbly for him to continue for a moment, and so he sits down there on the rock on this lonely plateau. He notices he has left blood on a stone.
Nick draws his knees up to his chest and rests his forehead on them, and he considers resting because he is exhausted, see. And he has learned nothing, has come to no new insight, and there has been a secret worry in him all along that he is not enough. (There is a secret fear in Nicholas that we repeat our mistakes, see, that all life is held in a kind of stasis and grows no better nor worse: his actions do not matter. See: he despairs.)
When he pushes himself to his feet, this too surprises him. At first he does not even know why; he is only thinking of how badly he wants to see Pen overjoyed when he returns triumphant, he is thinking of distant horizons he would like to cross and secrets he would like to find in worlds beyond this. He is thinking of Liz, and how desperately he wants what happened to mean something.
So he gets up, and for a moment his body does not feel like his body. And on he goes.
crow
[Stamina some more!]
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (7, 9) ( success x 2 )
crow
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (3, 8) ( success x 1 )
crow
Dice: 2 d10 TN6 (1, 5) ( botch x 1 )
crow
[Perception + Alertness?]
Dice: 5 d10 TN6 (1, 4, 4, 7, 8) ( success x 2 )
crow
[Perception + Awareness?]
Dice: 7 d10 TN8 (2, 3, 6, 7, 7, 7, 7) ( fail )
crow
There are places where Time does not operate the way most people believe it operates. Nicholas has explained to Penelope: it is not linear, we are at once past future present, it has all happened before, everything that has happened and will happen exists within us in this single moment, this Wheel which is One.
He has been in those places before: they existed in worlds outside of this one. He met crows there too.
So it is that when he arrives back at the start of the ridge and sees only his own bloody footprints ahead of him, rust-faded and soaking into stone, there is a noise from deep in his throat that is half a groan of dismay and half anguished. Know that bodies are surprisingly resilient things: he feels like he is dying, like he should be dying, and yet he was able to push on as though he had not been walking for minutes hours days centuries eternity.
For a moment he only watches the crow. Then he says, "I'm lost." It is at once testing the creature (he does not always know what is a spirit, see, he lives so often in this world and the next and has seen them outside of where they are bound) and a plea for help.
He looks once back down the slope, considers simply backtracking, and then looks back up at the crow.
crow
[Avatar?]
Dice: 3 d10 TN6 (6, 8, 9) ( success x 3 )
crow
Nicholas knows that down in the darkness he will find his Avatar. Nicholas also knows: he does not have wings, and with rueful reflection, he can hear Pen telling him that he could have wings if he would learn the Ars Essentiae.
He stands, still pleading for steadiness from his legs, at the lip of the ridge, and he: wonders. He wonders whether to trust it (whether to trust himself) and the way the dark wings melted into the black is transfixed in his memory.
And of course he is afraid. This is a dreamscape, this may be another world: but it could kill him.
So he looks into the darkness, looks up, and hesitates. He closes his eyes, draws in a breath - out - in, and there is a sort of cycle isn't there in the crest and fall, in potential and in its realization. He does this, and extends himself outward toward the landscape to get a sense of the lay of what lies past.
If he even can.
[Correspondence 1, sight. Base diff 4, -1 for using meditation. WP.]
Dice: 2 d10 TN3 (9, 10) ( success x 3 ) [WP]
twilight
Physical what is physical here and yet: the darkness is not pierced. It is still inky and it is absolute, some inverted starless sky it now seems: a dome, a void, an absence in the way the sky above him is a dome, a void, an absence. Which is to say: an illusion of all of these things.
A trick of time, distance, perspective.
Perhaps reality. Wished into being by the maddening crowd. The sun once revolved around the earth, afterall.
And the sun revolved the earth, both before and after. Perhaps the Hermetics have an explanation for this shifting-of-spheres. Perhaps Gaia and and Helios liked the dance.
There is a stair: it hewn from rock but also constructed. A long, narrow stair leading down to a long, narrow causeway that crosses some great dark void or great dark ocean that rings a singular, rocky island and then: cuts its way back up, switchbacks criss-crossing an otherwise sheer cliff rising rising rising to an impossibly high plateau that is crowned, in turn, by a very simple ruin.
Wait: there is not one stair. There are a hundred. There are a thousand. There is a stair for every step he has taken in his dogged circuit of this rocky ridge, even if, now, they are all dissolving back into themselves. Creating from that dissolution this particular stair, still impossible to discern from the darkness below, at his very feet.
crow
There is a stair. He knows this because he can sense the earth breathing around him because Gaia and Helios liked the dance because he is aware, acutely, of himself as a tiny segment of what surrounds him. He is Creation: Creation is Nicholas.
So he doesn't have to look to see the stair stretching in front of him, a thousand steps yawning over a chasm or dark ocean.
Nick's eyelids flutter shut, his lashes beat against his cheeks like dark wings, and he has to draw in a deep breath or two to steady the pounding of his heart at the sight (pain is glory is death is awe) and the sudden reminder of the stabbing in his feet.
He lowers a foot to the stair below him and though he cannot see where it is, he knows. And he begins the descent to the causeway. His footsteps are ginger at first because every lift and fall of his foot on the next step causes his skin to scream. It becomes easier to tune out as it becomes one long note: sometimes the body is this way when it becomes overwhelmed.
twilight
He knows and: he closes he is and he trusts and: he feels the world entombed and radiant all around him. The steps are rough, are crumbling beneath his already abraded feet, are warm somehow and also - here and there - crusted with salt.
One step, then another. The world all in shadow, this nothing that abounds, and he closes his eyes to it, entirely. Another sort of absence.
He does not fall.
The stair descend - and in ten - twenty - a hundred feet? - he begins to feel the warmth of the sun upon his skin.
crow
He does not fall, and this does not surprise him, necessarily. Nick has walked between worlds and communicates daily with things other people, even the people most important to him, cannot see. What he feels is relief: that he was not wrong, and then it washes over him again, stronger, as his skin begins to soak up sunlight like newly unfurled leaves in spring.
He reaches for the railing, and it is as much to support himself at this point as it is to seek guidance as he moves down the path. He has to lean on it, to ask his arms to begin to do some of the work usually reserved solely for his legs.
It must be an ocean beneath him. He knows because he can smell the salt. He knows because the salt crystals burn into the bottoms of his feet and bring tears to the corners of his eyes.
He continues his descent, however slowly, and down to the narrow causeway.
twilight
With the descent: comes dawn.
Starts the way it always does. Some strange, fae quality that curls up the edges of the night. Not enough to make one believe, entirely, that darkness will end, but maybe enough to seed the question in the mind. A new breathability, perhaps.
Here there are no songbirds to wake from their drowsing perches and start in on their morning cacophony, but still - that sense, of awareness, expectation, promise, which leads soon enough to the softest, rosiest glow painting the edges of the horizon, expanding across the sky.
The causeway descends from the nearly-shear edge of the high ridge he had circumnavigated earlier, crosses a turbulent blue ocean that crashes into the supports, then rises, rises, rises in dramatic switchbacks from the water's edges to the heights of a rocky crag perfectly outlined by the nearly circular - mountain? crater? - he hiked all-the-way-around that contains, somehow, this sea. On the heights: a church, perhaps. Terra cotta tiles on the roof have a glow of their own in the coming dawn. At the water's edge some ways off the path, a much small structure. Like a fisherman's hut. Midway up the heights - also some ways off the causeway - the mouth of a cave near where a natural arch of salt-lashed rock rises from the ocean.
Ahead: three little gates, side by side by side. He must pass through one of them if he wishes to continue. The left-most, the right-most, or the center.
There is a boy sitting on the the balustrade framing the causeway.
His mouth is sewn-shut.
crow
The dawn arrives, and with it a sense of familiarity, a sense of just having lived this: it does not seem so long ago that he left his house, and Pen's, to go trekking up the side of a mountain. But it was at least a day; it might even be more than that. He has been awake for more than twenty-four hours, if the daylight here is yoked to the sun in the same way.
He is still convincing himself he is not exhausted, and so when his foot finally touches down upon the causeway he continues on. And from here he can smell the sea, and it seems like it has been much longer than eight months since he left New England.
The boy is visible long before Nick arrives within comfortable speaking distance, and so each step, his limping gait, punctuates the awkwardness of his approach until finally he arrives. And when he does, he stops, and there is a thoughtful regard of the child sitting there on the balustrade. Nick has not missed the stitches around his mouth: ragged things?
"Hello," he says first. Then he looks toward the gates. Back to the boy. And then, "Are you waiting for someone to pass through, or just sitting?"
twilight
If daylight here is yoked to the sun in the same way. Which is such an if. Where is he, even? Why assume that daylight = sun and not giant furred caterpillar rolling over on its belly. Why give in to something as simple and straightforward as diurnal rhythms. Perhaps the light came not because of the sun or the moon or the stars that were never in the sky, but because he required it.
The boy, though. Mouth-sewn-shut. Lips stitched together, is swinging his legs with a child's idle abandon as if it were any other day. Nicholas greets him, and the boy looks up curiously.
Nods to the hello, but does not reply.
Says nothing, not even in response to so direct a question. After a moment, though, he makes a little shrug. So: there's that. What does it mean?
A very open question.
crow
Complete silence, or a nonreply, Nick was only partly prepared for; after all, the boy is a child, and children are rarely silent even when attempts have been made to make them so. They are resilient that way; of course, in this place he is probably anything but ordinary.
And so Nick is almost relieved when he makes some reply in the form of a shrug.
Nicholas is half a scarecrow at this point, with his pants cuffed to the middle of his calf and his backpack still hanging from his shoulders and his water mostly forgotten. Sweat and humidity have not been kind to his curls, have made a dense stormcloud of them.
So he watches the boy for a moment. Glances back to the gate. And then crosses the short span to the balustrade and sits next to the boy. "Have any idea what's past any of those gates?"
twilight
The boy glances at Nicholas. Sly glance: half-slid. Speculative and assessing in equal parts.
Nods.
Yes.
Of course he bloody well does.
(Or maybe that's a no: who knows? noone goes there. One-two-three.)
crow
When the boy glances up at Nick he will find Nick looking down at him, down and sidelong in this way that is not quite sly but is assessing, too, in its own fashion. He does not show surprise when the boy nods: of course he knows.
"Which one would you go through, if you were going past them?"
Nick folds his hands in his lap, and here he looks back at the three choices he has available (and without any idea of what's on the other end.) This is the way many fables start, isn't it?
Sometimes it's also the way fables end.
twilight
One. Two. Three.
The boy holds up his fingers: fore, then middle, then ring. As if he were counting: onetwothree onetwothree onetwothree. Like a Waltz, like some named and timeless dance. A triplet. Then he considers his fingers. Folds them all up, yes, right, because he's not going to answer.
Until he does.
Points down. At the ocean, far far below.
That's where he'd go. Might die on the rocks, but: well. The chances you take.
crow
Nick follows the boy's finger toward the ocean, toward the white-capped waves beating against the rocks at the shore. There is something reflective in his expression, something of the rose-pink dawn, as he lifts his head to regard the three doors another time.
The other questions he has he suspects he will receive no answer to.
"My wife could just go up and over," he says to the boy. "I wouldn't know where to begin." But then he rises, and walks over to the three gates.
He does not choose one, and does not move to select one yet. He paces the breadth of the causeway, drags his feet over stone and back again, and he looks for a way around. He looks for hidden doors, he looks for a way through, or simply beyond. And, once, glances back over his shoulder at the boy. "Are you happy with those stitches in your mouth?"
twilight
There are simply these three gates: made of iron, rusted and worn. When he looks through them, he can see the causeway as it continues on.
Stone after stone.
He is half-way across the water. If he looks beyond he can see: through one, the cave set mid-way up the height of the island, near its nobby arch. Through another: the church with its terra cotta roof crowning the island. Through another: he espies the fisherman's hut.
There are three gates.
There is the water far, far below.
There is the way-he-came.
And to his question, the boy gives a shrug. Yes/no/maybe?
crow
It is after pacing back and forth across the length of the causeway for a moment that he realizes that there is ahead, behind, and below. Nick pauses at each gate to look at what lies beyond, drawing in a breath which he holds there in his chest, a glowing ball of potential before it is exhaled once more.
As he passes finally in front of the gate through which he can see the church crowning the island, he rests a hand on it and glances back at the boy. "I'm going to move on, then. Thank you."
And so: the boy may have chosen to go beneath the waves, and Nicholas chooses to walk on ahead, though jumping the bridge is a temptation if only to give his feet a rest. Possible death against the rocks is a temptation, if only to give his feet a rest.
He tries the gate first, gives it a tug, and should it open without resistance, he steps through and to the other half of the causeway.
twilight
He tries the gate through which he can see the church crowning the heights of the island. Orange tiles in the pink morning light. The boy watches him, feet still swinging, this low, offhand, not-quite-predictable rhythm as his heels strike the old stones.
Rusted groan from the gate, as he pushes it. To be fair: there is some resistance, but there always is, in old things made-to-move. If he looks back once he has reached the other side he will see: through back the way he came: all three gates.
And Nicholas himself standing no longer on the causeway (perhaps though: he did walk it. perhaps he did so on-his-knees, as some crawl up the Scala Sancta.) but on the portico of that church, far up on the heights of the island.
crow
If he were to press himself, Nick would not have been able to explain what drew him to the church, specifically. Unlike his wife, he did not grow up religious, with his chicana mother a long-ago-lapsed Catholic and his absent father only concerned about the sorts of things that generally concern absent fathers. He chose it based on intuition alone, intuition being another word for instinct (though it implies something more refined, doesn't it, something higher), and he chose it because climbing up and up has been his goal since setting out.
He makes a little noise when he steps through the gate to find himself on the portico of the church rather than on the opposite half of the causeway. It takes him a moment to orient himself: he does not have the ability to rend Space as Penelope does. (Perhaps he did walk it. Do his feet tell him so? Do his knees?)
Nick's hands come together almost unconsciously and he rubs the interior of one of his palms with a thumb, presses it as though to massage out some knot, before he takes his first few hesitant steps forward.
And then before he can proceed much farther he turns around. There is an entire island below, and a sea, and the causeway itself: and for a moment he stands there only to view how far he has come.
For what?
twilight
If he asks his feet and his knees where he has been: they have a story. He has other means to interrogates lapses of time, too. If the interregnum matters. If it has meaning. If here to there is as important to him as arrival, he can Know.
Perhaps he does not so will it.
Now he stands before the church, which is hewn of stone, much like the stairs and the causeway across the water. A single rose window above the arched doors, which are made of wound and bound in rusting iron. No light from within illuminates the rose window: if there is a designed written into the glass, it is very hard to see.
--
The light has not changed. It is still: rosy dawn, this strange stasis, for all that he has the feeling that hours and hours and hours have passed. Days or weeks, more than either, less than anything. The dark ocean kissed by that light, the pale stone of the causeway both illuminated by it and incised against the darkness with it. He cannot see the cave from where he stands, but the hut: far far down at the water's edge. That he can see.
Even as he watches, pieces of it all come to life. Dark birds arise from the ridgeline where he walked for hours and hours. Far down below, a boy with his mouth-sewn-shut casts a fishing line into the dark, turbulent waters from the balustrade of the causeway. On and on.
crow
Remember: Nicholas could not say what it is that drew him up here, or why he chose the church and what presumably (he cannot remember and does not think to, but his feet and his knees tell a story) was an arduous climb. He cannot say what pulled him here more than the cave (mystery) or the hut (home.)
But he looks down over the island as the sun illuminates the sprawl of the ocean and the causeway that leads back over to the mountain, back into darkness, and he is glad. Nicholas could be a slender statue carved at the edge of the cliff, here, tattered pilgrim that he is and with one hand gripping the other, his eyes for the distant horizon.
He draws in one breath. Two. He watches the ascent of the dark flight of birds.
Then he turns back to the church door and casts an eye up to the rose window. There is nothing that he can see writ in the glass, nothing to tell him his purpose here in the arched doors. And he has time, but what mortal has it to waste?
So he opens the doors and pokes his curly head through shortly before the rest of him follows.
twilight
Here is a cascade of impressions, each folding into the next, and the one after. The frame of a backpack tucked against the half of the arched wood-and-iron door that he did not open. The subtle depression at the center of the canvas, the trailing hipstrap. A suggestion of another's footprints in the age old dust. Such darkness: such shadow, such stillness pierced through by such illumination. From without the structure was spare, even humble. Little more than a peasant church constructed stone by painful stone atop the bluff. Inside though: light from above, cutting in at sharp angles as if from a clerestory.
Wood. Dust and oil and candle wax. Row after row after row after row of pews. The central aisle paved with big slabs of worn stone. Names carved each into each, worn smooth by the tread of many feet. So worn that it would require work, real work, on one's knees, to even begin to read the name him, or her, buried below. So many of them: for the apse is so far from the entrace that the alter - if indeed there is an alter - and the ambulatory, and the radiating chapels are lost in a sort of illuminated fog.
Someone is inside. She is within. He catches a glimpse of her profile as she turns, leaning forward, elbow grazing the wood, scarred and polished by so-many-hands. Something about her chin, her opening mouth. Some dark-winged thing at her shoulder.
The edge of her smile.
And - somehow he is just and only now seeing it, the multitudes surrounding her.
An impression of so much more -
---
Some time later: he wakes up.
The same cliff where he first encountered her. It seems to be morning. Hungry, almost dizzy from thirst, the agony of his bare, lacerated feet. And: somehow, something else.
Something new.
crow
He steps past the threshold and into the church, and halts upon taking his first step inside so that he can look around. It's minute, that pause, and could seem to be a hesitation couldn't it? (She would know better; he is her, She is the divinity within him.)
He breathes in the scent of wood. Dust and oil and candle wax.
Nick's bare feet wander along the stone, which has (mercifully) been worn smooth by thousands upon thousands of footsteps before his own. There is fog, but something in him knew that she was here already and so he:
sees her, the edge of her smile, as she begins to turn toward him.
And the sense of infinity, of being infinite, of so much that he does not yet know spread out before him.
And then he wakes.
His head spins from thirst, from hunger, from pain, so much so that he has to catch his bearings and take stock of where he is. It feels like years since he was here last. (Years could have passed, do pass when people side step: perhaps he ought to be warier.) There is something new, something he cannot put his finger on and so at first he does not try. He pats his pocket for the granola bar she gave him long before.
twilight
There it is, just where he put it when she gave it to him, as she was passing through.
crow
Nick pulls the granola bar out of his pocket and for a moment blinks at the outside of the wrapper, measures it in his hand. He is bleary eyed and there is a nagging voice in the back of his mind telling him that it is morning, a day has passed, and he really ought to call or text his wife to let her know he hasn't broken his neck falling over a cliff.
That will wait a few minutes, because the part of him that is an animal has seized onto the fact that this is food and he is so very hungry. So he rips open the wrapper, and he takes a bite: nearly half of the bar.
twilight
A day: or two, or three. How would he know? And he'll have to get himself down before he can call his wife. There are still places in the world that are equally free of signal and noise, and this is one of them.
And that granola bar: tastes like peanut butter and blood and starlight. Exactly as it should.
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