[attr="class","appbody"]
[attr="id","pegasuscol"]i.
when he was a child, he dreamt of old delphi falling into the sea. [break][break]
the port was the first to go. heavy mercantile ships were unmoored from their posts, long-neglected rotwood beneath the surface buckling beneath the force of tempestuous waves. the streets, varnished in an effort to make the old new, flooded, sea-mist kissing the high walls as people fled. the newest paths gave way beneath their feet, concrete and asphalt upended until they broke. in the undertow came away the loosest wooden frames. [break][break]
white foam turns into a putrid brown as inch by tawny inch of sand was drawn away from the shore until all that but remained was the stony bedrock.[break][break]
then, the canals: empty houses that held only the silence between the people that lived there. plank by plank, coming apart in the rush of water and salted air. if people are places, then he has his father's tempest of a temper and his mother's light pollution. his neighbors always complimented him on the pallor of shells that decorated the shore—his, those were always his—and the apples of his cheeks. if people are places, then he is the prettiest houses on the shores of old delphi sinking beneath the waves. if people are places, then he is the sea green algae that plants itself in every crevice and grows like a weed. [break][break]
he wakes only when he realizes he'd learned how to drown on dry land. [break]
[attr="id","pegasuscol"]ii.
he met god when he was twelve. [break][break]
it was midnight, and they, the only two people in the world. it is another night of dreams that his parents wishes he wouldn't tell them about: the doe with no eyes, a woman with a bird nest where her ribcage ought to be, the stark white coral that grows out of a whalefall. wind whistles through a silent temple as forgotten as the old gods. [break][break]
sitting there in front of him is god: a girl no more than seventeen years of age, still his senior by some time, and a stranger that he'd been told never to call by name. his mother gave her bread once out of pity. everyone in this town knew her, but did not call her: a strange girl whose father didn't care to remember her and a mother who was content to spend her entire life chasing after him. [break][break]
not all ghosts that haunt are dead, his own whispered. [break][break]
"are you the one they sent for me?" ███████ asked. [break][break]
"i ... i don't kn—" [break][break]
"are you the one they sent for me?" ███████ asked again, this time more urgently. [break][break]
the waves crashed against the rocks. her dark and dirty hair aloft on the wind, knuckles bruised and her dress torn and sewed back together in patchwork. if people are places, ███████ has her father's sea cliffs and her mother's bone-deep cold. [break][break]
"i know you see things; they're signs, you know," she continued, "i understand. so few people understand you, don't they? they say they're just dreams, but you and i both know what they are. you hear from them too, don't you? you see them too, don't you? they want to be remembered. you know that too, don't you?"[break][break]
"so, i am asking again: are you the one they sent for me?" ███████ asked. [break][break]
understanding; did he ever wish for such a thing? he says that his dreams are prophecies, but no witch with the gift see their gift in him; so, his parents tell him that they are just the dreams of a child too fascinated with the bones of birds and sea creatures. [break][break]
but, he knows they must be special.[break][break]
( they must be, for if they weren't then what was all his loneliness for?
)[break][break]
"... yes." [break][break]
she takes his old name and calls him verity. [break][break]
he thinks he breathes a little easier that night. [break]
[attr="id","pegasuscol"]iii.
"do you believe our lives are truly ours?" ███████ asks once. [break][break]
it is a test, as all her questions are. it is how all gods ought to be, he thinks, as it is only through this way that they can divine that who truly believe. he is still her only follower, but her most devout. he does not doubt her as a child of prophecy in the way the others do. just as she does not doubt him, for she named him truth. if she is god, then he is her messenger. he does not need to speak. he does not need to know how to answer. [break][break]
in these years past, she has learned he is simple and clumsy in the way that all mortals are fated to be, so she provides. [break][break]
"i do not think they are. the old gods once revealed the way to us and we abandoned them," ███████ says, obstinance alone enough to deter any argument to the contrary. [break][break]
"how ... did we ... abandon them, ███████?" he asks. [break][break]
"by forgetting them," she answers. [break][break]
"you won't forget me, will you, verity?" ███████ continues, descending from her perch in this old temple that they'd made theirs. her hands, calloused from years of hard labor to support her mortal body, grace his cheeks. her lips, dry and cracked: his forehead. [break][break]
"never," he answers. [break]
[attr="id","pegasuscol"]iv.
"do you believe in reincarnation, v?" [break][break]
it is raining at her mother's funeral. they said that they found the woman in the gutter. ███████ said she hadn't seen her in months. so, though her hands were scratched and scarred, the officers leave and let be in search of the drink to forget the decay. god's body seems smaller now than it has ever been. her shoulders are twisted inward, sunken eyes wearier than before. she has her mother's bone-deep cold, but she does not tremble even as he offers a coat—a reminder that this life that they share is one borne of suffering. [break][break]
hers, for the circumstances. his, for the lack of understanding. [break][break]
"do you believe in reincarnation, v?" ███████ asks again, pressing for an answer. [break][break]
"... do you?" he asks, in lieu of a reply. [break][break]
"it is a sin for a child to kill its progenitor, v," ███████ answers. "this, too, is your failure: her life is yours to carry." his hands still shake when he thinks of how thin her mother's neck was in his hands: as brittle as a sand dollar and still he couldn't break it.
[attr="id","pegasuscol"]v.
"do you believe in reincarnation, v?" [break][break]
on some level, he'd always understood the question when she asked him the first time. [break][break]
that, it was a question of if he knew or not that their lives were inexorably intertwined. out there on the rocky jetties, ███████ stood, wearing her mother's old wedding dress. the skirts are newly splattered with sea-mist and the fog of a winter's eve. its hem, torn in the places where the moth-eaten holes caught on the street, bloody where her cut feet had landed. she calls out to him, there as she waited at the edge of the world to tell him this: that he was the person she'd spent her whole life waiting for. [break][break]
"do you believe in reincarnation, v?" ███████ asks again. "call me by my name!"[break][break]
he keeps her waiting too long this time. [break][break]
a foot slips and she falls into the sea and a boy called prophet follows. a saltwater craving: her frost-blue hands grasp at his wrist, mooring her there like a ship and its anchor. he hears her thin laughter—this, the sails of a ship that is theirs—in between the rush of water. he has always thought it was possible that she could be a saint, the kind that is holy only by her pain, but he realizes only in this last moments with her before the ocean currents tear her hand away that she is too utterly human. "
verity!" [break][break]
if people are places, then she was his. [break][break]
if people are places, he is her. she was him. [break][break]
when they find him on the shore, how should he answer with anything but
yes? [attr="class","appplayedby"]played by [attr="class","appooc"][attr="id","pegasuscol"]aphelion
