spendingallthistime - Tumblr blog

[spendingallthistime]

Nephilim looks askance at the shard in Aeson’s hand. 

“Go on then,” he says, “put it back together.” 

Aeson blinks, surprised, glancing over at you. You shrug. “I don’t know. Maybe this is like a weird rite of passage, or something.” 

Nephilim laughs, his expectant eyes never leaving Aeson’s face. 

“Uh, O.K.” Aeson holds the shard out in front of him, his mouth set in a grim line, his expression pinched. A muscle in his jaw twitches, and green mist pours from his hands, fragments rising and reassembling in the air, till the vase, newly whole, settles neatly on table in front of you.

“Clean work,” Nephilim says, his face inscrutable. He wanders to the back of the room, and returns with a pale, long stemmed tulip pinched between his forefinger and thumb. “My favourite, tulips. Nearly perfectly symmetrical.” He holds the bud up to his face, inhaling deeply, closing his eyes. “They bend, too. Towards the light. Even in a vase.” 

He drops it gently into the vase, and with a desultory flick of his wrist, fills it with water and the three of you watch, quiet, as it begins to run in rivulets down its sides, from what must be the places it fractured in its fall. 

The hush of silence goes on and on throughout, till Nephilim appears satisfied that the vase is empty, and plucks the tulip out of it to drop at Aeson’s feet. 

“Even if it can’t hold water, it looks in one piece. Such satisfaction, no?” “To think we can fix something?”

[spendingallthistime]

The mist gathers speed, sweeping in thicker and thicker, winding and seemingly insensible, charging down the slopes of the basin like a beast. The early morning humidity is full of the dreadful promise of worse to come.

You pick your way through the wet undergrowth by the riverbank, wild water racing by, the late evening sun pale through the trees.

The jungle, fat, lush, opaque and glutted. It’s green and dark brown and flecked with black, white, yellow and red, blossoming with hot breath, luxuriating beneath its profusion of blossoms.

Days, you’ve held, spent walking, alternatively stopping to make camp or to commune with the Gods. Days, you’ve lost. Time arrives soundlessly, and withdraws without your noticing. The woods, they do that to you, Artemis had warned. Everything’s familiar because it looks the same. Like a sea of faces. Like a recurring dream. 

Up ahead, Aeson lifts his legs comically high, clumping through tall grass. “What are the chances that we’re lost?” You call out.

“Good, I guess,” he says, without turning. 

{insert behavioural options}

“It was just like this—,” he says, stopping with a start. “After.” 

“Aeson?” {insert behavioural options} 

A light breeze ruffles the reeds along the riverbank. He turns at the sound of his own name, and looks at you for a moment like he’s wondering who you are. “The day after my mother died. There was this lot, behind our house. It wasn’t a forest, not really, but the trees were dense back there, and old. I walked in, and I couldn’t remember how to walk out. It was like everything had been rearranged behind me.” His voice is low, a tremble to the words. “It got dark. I couldn’t even see myself anymore. And then, I guess I must’ve fallen down, somewhere. I don’t—there was nothing else there.”

He nods, his face vacant. There’s an odd, feverish glint in his eyes. Seeing them sends a sharp hurt and light through you.

“She used to say that wanting to understand was one of the worst things that could have happened to her. But—I needed to understand. To explain it. 

Alone and afraid are the same thing, mostly. And I was all by myself.” He gasps, “You’ve always had somebody, haven’t you? Haven’t you?” 

{behavioural options} 

“There was nobody, {name}. Nobody to tell me there was any other way to be. I thought that was all there was. All there ever would be. But it wasn’t my fault,” he says, a shrill note of desperation entering his voice, “What happened. It wasn’t, {name}.” 

There’s a voice in the back of your head whispering for you to be afraid, warning you. You taste the fear in the back of your throat, nameless and inexplicable, bitter as old coffee. It’s happening, you tell yourself . . . But what? What’s happening? 

“She let me walk around feeling certain. I knew things would change, but I didn’t know, then, to be afraid. Only after. I thought, I thought — I could help. But I didn’t know. I didn’t, {name}. That more than what you don’t know, you should be scared of what you do.”

You step unconsciously backwards, listening, possessed by something you sense, but don’t understand.

“I asked all the time. What could I do? Nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing. I thought anything would be better than nothing. Anything would be better than pointless waiting.” He puts his hand over his eyes.

The sun is low, burning gold through the trees, casting your shadows before you on the ground, elongated and distorted.

When they’re gone out of his head, these words, they’ll be gone, forever. Where will they go? Nobody ever forgets anything, not really, though sometimes they pretend, when it suits them. Memories are permanent. Remembering makes them fresh. The words would go where they’d always been. Back where they’d come from. They were his. They could no more escape than a shadow detaching itself from its body and skulking off on its own. 

When he speaks again, his voice sounds unimaginably far away. Fallen, as if into the dirt. “I wanted time to stand still, or I wanted more of it. I want her back. I want everything back, the way it was. But it doesn’t mean anything. After what I did, everything happened so fast. I know what I was doing, and where and how I lived but it’s like a hole in my life, like something that happened to somebody else, a long time ago.” 

{call back to another time he talked abt his mama or something athena said/did, what i say to you is never what i say to you but something else instead "In the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone; and many things must happen, many things must go right, a whole constellation of events must be fulfilled, for one human being to successfully advise or help another."}

An all engulfing panic takes you there, then, and you open your mouth to yell, or else to cry out, for help, for anything, for someone but there’s no reply, only a sudden silence and then —

Nothing. 

But even Nothing can’t last forever.

Memory like a bruise. Fading. Like pushing through a membrane, like submerging yourself in water and coming up for air some place else. The past is ahead and behind and on the sides. 

{Behavioural options} - should these have an impact on what goes on? 

You remember, for instance a beach fringing the ocean, the joining line of sea and sky invisible. The waves, curved and unspent, the sounds of the nets hitting the water, all seem on the verge of dropping away into nothing. In the distance, a woman waves her arm and turns, pausing to glance at the horizon. The beach, empty except for a gaggle of flutter-fluttering seagulls, seems to stretch out like a sheet, wide and white, and out in the water, there are a few boats being tossed around by the wind. A line of clouds is slipping out beyond the sea. The tide hums as it gathers force, and the wind takes her hair straight back. A camera flashes and forgets.

Years were passing in the spaces between moments.

You’re being propelled forward, fast around the corner, up the hill, to a steep roofed house with pale blue walls. The door opens, and it’s her, coming out of the house, coming towards you, smiling, glad. It’s you and it’s her and you knew it would be like this, that she would be there, had always been there; roses and yarrow blowing in the windows, music spraying, low, from the radio, a man’s voice, jazz-smooth and her, singing and touching her lips to your—Aeson’s—hands. 

I’m not looking for another as I wander in my time. 

Walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme.

You know my love goes with you as your love stays with me

It’s just the way it changes, like the shoreline and the sea. 

You can feel gravity sucking you deeper, time accelerating, the darkness around you widening until you’re somewhere else, an area of space with no horizon, that awes you in its foreverness, and you feel calm for just a moment. 

Then you recognize that you’re floating without a tether. 

A. You scream without sound, dry heaving in nameless fear. I want it to stop, you think. Please, stop. 

B. It’s so desperately lonely. You curl into yourself, trying to will whatever this is away. 

C. Calm, calm, you tell yourself. You cover your face with your hands, trying to stem the tide of nausea rising in your throat. 

D. You lash out with everything you’ve got, trying to hit something, anything. 

Pictures swim together with memories like a slide show. 

The lights of a 1000 chandeliers flicker and prism. A carousel whirls. A woman presses her face to aquarium glass, and blows a fishmouth-ed kiss at you. Stars wheel overhead, close in your telescope. In the lurid red light of a dark room, her teeth are ghostly white in her smile. 

{this scene should only be accessible if your relationship with Aeson is high enough, or you’ve hit some sort of other flag} 

[spendingallthistime]

Faustian Bargain- Santiago

[spendingallthistime]

Hi! So Fallen Hero:R & Wayhaven have sucked me into this "Choice of Games" hell. I mean, I have you to thank in part for the inspiration to try my hand at writing my own, I guess, but... Do you have any advice for someone contemplating this? Do you plan for archs that may happen in later books or do you just wing it as you go? How do you manage all the options? Are there certain tropes you avoid/embrace in your story? How difficult is it, really? Thank you for any response!!

I plan 80% in general terms, then 20% will surprise me as I go when the characters starts interacting. The whole Fallen Hero trilogy is planned, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to seed clues in earlier books. As for tropes… I am so bad about the meta surrounding writing I barely know what they are, I write what I want to read, and if people like it, good for them.

As for how difficult… compared to what? For me it is harder than writing a comic because of the sheer workload, but easier than writing a novel since I don’t have to choose the best canon path and jope I manage to convey my intentions to people but can have variability. The coding is pretty easy, I use maybe 10% of what choicescript can do, but that’s enough.

I think the main difficulty is if you’re able to think in paths and how things connect. I do, so that’s not hard for me.

I have got that question a few times before, so here are some links with advice!

How to structure and start a story: 

https://fallenhero-rebirth.tumblr.com/post/175340588741/hi-malin-first-off-let-me-say-that-i-loved-fallen

And then, some answers I gave to people on the Choice of Games forum, there are really good creative discussions there:

Some discussions about creativity and copying: 

https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/how-the-heck-are-people-creative/39278/38?u=malinryden

Some discussions about story structure:

https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/story-structure-how-do-you-do-it/37932/3?u=malinryden

What people wished they knew when starting choicescript:

https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/things-you-wished-you-knew-when-starting-a-project/37424/8?u=malinryden

Character overload:

https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/preventing-character-overload/36832/2?u=malinryden

Combat and stats:

https://forum.choiceofgames.com/t/looking-for-opinions-on-combat-redundancy/34917/21

[spendingallthistime]

@eduardamsl/instagram

[spendingallthistime]

Now, these years later, you have a memory of being roused from sleep. Before you, as you blinked dreams from your lashes, sat a God, a woman accused of the greatest of all crimes. Of taking what had not been her’s to take. A thief and an aunt. A possible future.

[spendingallthistime]

The pain in his head became duller as he walked uphill. It was cold out, a kind of sobering cold, so intense that it was like being struck and Saint retreated further into his jacket, as though his body had the power to snatch its senses inwards, away from the surface of his skin. A savage wind swept everything up in its scrambled swirling.  

The ring remained cool, in his left hand. He felt it there, as it had always been and wondered idly, why it did not warm to his body temperature.

The gale picked up with a rising howl, the dust sweeping over him, smoothly abrasive. It built, pushing him back a step, screaming in his ears, bending his outstretched arms.

Raindrops begin to shatter on his eyelids, his ears, his throat. The wind roared now, violent and very alive, and he turned his back to it, so it blew past and not against him. There was a flash of lightning, so bright, it lit up the space behind his eyes, and then the thunder, a crack and a boom and rumble and as it echoed, the rain redoubled.

Water hammered relentlessly down, slamming into the earth and then abruptly, with an alarming unexpected-ness the storm died.

He’s standing in the street, feeling the wetness of the rain on his skin while also not feeling it. Not feeling it because (1) he wasn’t in his body anymore, and (2) he was in his fourteen-year-old body, while Calypso shook him, ran her hands over his face.

Alone, in his room, just the two of them. It was cold that night, too. Space heater going. Thrum-thrum. Calypso asleep, beside him, smiling a beautiful sleepsmile. Saint waking, as though from a nightmare, putting on his shoes and walking wearily out of the room, laces trailing, down the hall. He knows it is your voice in the corridor but outside, it’s empty. Gauzy yellow light coming in through the window.

There had been no trace of you. Your face, your body, your silhouette are lost. In your place, an absence. A day-time void to be stepped carefully around. A night-time hole to fall into.

Calypso, stumbling barefoot through the door, unseeing, into the flailing darkness. The black mantle of silence like something smothering around her. Tears trickled down her rigid cheeks and trembled along her jaw like raindrops on the edge of a roof.

Sorry, he’d slurred, uncomprehendingly, half-delirious when she’d found him. Sorry. Sorry. Don’t cry.

The past is desperate energy, live, an electric field, slipping cleanly through his fingers, he, fogged in, raising the same hope like a rag again and again to wipe his face—

This is what he knows: people’s dreams go on forever.

“Saint.” You clamp your hands on his shoulders, shake him with a roughness that sets his head lolling like a rag doll’s. “Saint.”

He reaches slowly out for you, taking a hold of your wrists, holding your hands in place. “Where did you go?”

“Nowhere. What is it? What happened?” You look again and find his face tinged with a profound tiredness, and the image seems faraway. “Why did you stop in the middle of the street?”

He’s waiting and as he does, all his senses on edge, he wants to freeze the whole universe, afraid that a leaf will stir, that someone will interrupt the two of you, some gesture shatter the spell of the moment, make it vanish and cast him back into the distance and null of words. “I waited for you. Where did you go?”

“Saint,” you say, and the shadow of your words is bigger than their substance, “I’ve been standing next to you the whole time. Look at me. We’re both drenched.”

He blinks rapidly, “I, you—”, opening and closing his mouth soundlessly, as though the words have gone right out of him. “Right there? The whole time?”

“The whole time,” you confirm, stumbling backwards when he sags, without warning, against you.

[spendingallthistime]

She turned abruptly to me, and her eyes were eager. “What is God?” “A focus of man’s belief. Where man believes, a god begins to grow. Men flicker, flash and fade. But belief doesn’t end. What the gods give they give only at the start. Because when you have nothing, then anything can be everything.”

Eckhart writes: God rid me of god.

What is it like, god of mine, what is it like? To have no potency, save in and though men? What is the truth? Do you behold men’s lives? Or is all belief a lie, a language made up one night to explain the blind hazard that rules the world?

Nothing is there but the clear pain of loss. It’s late now, though my bed is uninviting.

You’re here now, almost.

[spendingallthistime]

“Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless,” Athena says, and she spreads her arms in a wide-open embrace. “In tragedy, nothing is in doubt! Nothing remains to be decided! Everything is written, and that makes for tranquility. Tranquility of the best sort; borne of certainty. No hope. No foul, deceitful, delusion.”

Euripides writes: It was ordained for me–catastrophe. It was ordained for me–grief.

The god I answer to, I know, is different than the god I started with. “What is the truth, then?” I say. “Do you behold men’s lives? Or is all belief a lie, a language made up one night to explain the blind hazard that rules the world?”

That elegance, but I’ve caught whiff of fire. She is burning down. Ash and tallow.

“Gods are immortal. You cannot die. But you are not omnipotent; you have no potency save in and through men.”

The problem is: I am at the end. I am already burning.

[spendingallthistime]

I cannot unfold that which lines my thoughts in crisp, uncontorted language. 

The line is lost, The line is lost—

“This is the look of the truth,” Athena tells me. “Layered and elusive.” 

There are words, and words and none mean anything. They ruin one’s thoughts. Writing them makes them ridiculous, their linking and spelling only re-affirms my knowledge of their inadequacy, and even if I am glad to have something inane and inadequate on paper, I manage to lose hold of even this ridiculous and inane something. Pure dread. Language corrupts thought, words were made to demean it. 

Paper is an organ of melancholy. A ruined, ridiculous thing. 

My hands jerk forward like bad screen projectors. She takes them in her own. 

This is the space where a thought would be, but which I can’t get hold of. I hate this space. If silence is a veil, what is it hiding? Maybe the monstrosity of words is just too huge. They go on forever. But meanwhile, I watch all going dark outside. I sink. I melt. 

In the corner of my room, there is a telescope, black and sleek. Athena gave it to me, and it sits, still, where she left it, on its tripod by the window. Sometimes, on cloudless nights, after a daytime rain, I bring it out onto the balcony, and look up at the stars. 

On one particular night, though, the night after I’d _______________, I’d been absentmindedly scanning along the line of the horizon. A tremulous light descended, the light that had been emitted before I was born, light from other centuries, only now reaching Earth.

Athena, standing beside me had called this time travel. “What man has never felt, walking through the twilight, or looking up at the sky, that he has lost something irretrievable?”

What I felt then I could not name nor recognize, yet I was already aware of something stirring and changing, like the trees and rooftops in my eyepiece, sweeping swiftly past at incredible speed. The god I answer to, I know, is different than the god I started with. “Do you think yourself a man?” 

She smiled, like a knife. “Men love the stars. It’s the illusion of permanence, I’m certain. From here,” she said, spreading her arms in a wide-open embrace, “isn’t it easy to pretend that everything lasts forever?” 

“It does.” I say. “For you.” 

She reaches for me. “That poet you like so much,” she says, “Neruda.” “What is it he said? That men don’t live by the stars alone?” In the silence, the night took on again its immensity, its flesh. She turned abruptly to me, and her eyes were eager. “Cognition of the world does not exhaust human possibilities of forming questions about it, does it?” “Man” she said, leaning over me, “is a small cosmos, in which the order of the whole universe is reflected.” 

The heat of her body could have kept me warm for days. 

“Their gods, they change, but the prayers stay the same.” “The instinct for resistance, for no, for solitude, for escape, for imagining, rather than living things out: often, a mistake, but real—” 

“Is all our belief a lie, then, a language made up one night to explain the blind hazard that rules the world? Are men, their whole lives, students of longing, not having, not reaching? Not knowing?” 

 She stepped, lightly, over the balcony and onto the roof, and turned, waiting for me. “Hope is that mortal delusion. That mistake. Not the door, but the sense that there might be a door, at some point, some way out of the problems of the present moment. Men walk on hope as on crutches, hobbling.” 

Late light of dawn, self-forgetfulness.  Desire exists only in the man still living on hope. I want less and less and I doubt everything. Even my doubt.

It’s raining. Hard, too. I can hear it beating on the panes. 

My body belongs more to you, than to me.

It won’t be long. You’re here now, almost. 

[spendingallthistime]

<p><i>Quis ut deus? Who is like God?</i> <p>You’d seen it first, inscribed on a gold shield like a gong behind a plate glass window at the museum. Rolling it around in your mouth, savoring it, touching it with your tongue. <p> “There are competing theories,” Uncle Henry had said, his hand on your shoulder, and laughed. <p>You’d never known yourself to love a question that had existed as a consequence of its own insolubility before, but you were conscious of the pleasure you felt when you thought it, quietly, to yourself and were unable to broach even its surface. A labyrinth of literally infinitively forking Gods. <p>“Uncle Henry,” you say, from your darkened bed, “can I ask you a question?” <p>“Ask me two.” <p>“God knows everything, right? <p>"Who told you that?” <p>“Let’s just say that he does, O.K? He knows everything, right?” <p>“O.K, Nadira.” <p>“So who’s he asking?” <p>“Beg your pardon?” <p>“Quis ut Deus? Who’s he asking? If he knows. Already, I mean.” <p> Maybe it had something to do with God’s beneficience, his fundamental goodness, his inherent value, his love, the literal sort, that the question existed, that we existed to wonder it, because most things to do with God, did. <p>“Do you remember what I told you about Michael, the archangel?” <p>“Yeah.” <p>“Quis ut Deus is a translation of his name. So, God’s not really asking anyone. It’s a rhetorical question, and it was on Michael’s shield so it would be the last thing that Satan saw before he died. It was,” he paused, and you heard the long breath he drew in through his teeth, like a low whistle, “scornful.” “The point was that nobody could be like God, and that Satan was overcome by his own arrogance.” <p>Structurally—this somewhat rudimentary argument went—Lucifer had been the insouciant, mutinous rebel, Michael, the exemplification of God’s righteous wrath, which had overcome, obviously, Lucifer had something to prove, to assert, and God asserted nothing but the simple fact of his own actuality, I exist, therefore, my wrath obliviates, literally. Like literal love, transcending even the worst of sin. Wrath transcended like love. <p> So maybe it had something to do with the sinner, and the judge, and the fear of not being forgiven, and the relief of being loved again, but you didn’t believe that.  You’d held your hands up the light and it had shone through them. <p> See, if God was like nothing, and nothing was comparable unto him, then he was like everything. You believed that God was the things that were true and things that weren’t true and the things nobody knew were true or not. God became a metaphor, not a cariacature, not a diminished version of himself, a woman, a father, a mother, and hope against hope, a personal insurer, who worried and oversaw, and whose only interest was in belief. <p> You’d weep for God, later, the girl with the eyes as old as stones who sat in the hollow of her capsizing boat and saved only herself. 

[spendingallthistime]

Who speaks out of a Prophet’s mouth? 

I look at my hands, which are not my hands. 

I look at myself. It is someone else. 

It’s a storm. A storm, Athena said, leaning towards me. 

I thought, am I allowed to ask entire questions, I thought, take my hand, don’t let me be harmed. I thought you are the answer, you will outlive me, I thought that there was no pause, about the night spilling onto my books which were fanning over my desk and how outside it was light. 

My heart had been one hard syllable repeating. 

Then it was not mine, so it was yours. 

 I don’t know how I could re-present all of this for you. There’s nothing fetching about the natural. This is me. Not an act, but an identity. 

What people do with their histories; what they can make of what they are   given—

“What you are, you are forever.” Athena tells me, one day, in the library. 

I disagree. “People change,” I tell her. “You get better or worse at managing it, through stagnating, standing still, you can resist it, but there’s no continuity in people at all. Which is why it’s important to remember that change doesn’t always strike like lightning. Sometimes it’s slow, and sometimes, it isn’t. It’s annihilationist, that way. Harder to put a finger on. To brace yourself against. But be assured: it gets you.” 

She spread her arms, palms up in a gesture that may have been placatory on someone else, but on her, was possessed by the untroubled grace of an insouciant child. “Man is born into vanity and deception; he suffers, and endures for a few years, but each time the clock strikes, he is nearer to death. The length of a life like a spark. In one blink of the eye, they disappear and aren’t even permitted to choose how it happens. They’re prey to materials, combinations, their civilizations. Quaking ghosts. Helpless.” She shrugged, but held my gaze, curious. 

“Men are no better than dogs?” 

“Cowardly men. Is there anything uglier than a frightened man?” 

What she can’t understand, or change, is distant to her. Incomprehensible. 

I turned away, but she watched me. 

Straight from the fear of loss I plunge into the fear of being lost. I can’t stay long enough between them. You kick, a warm, fluttering pressure building and my hands in Athena’s are the hands of fear and test. With hands that search for what is already lost, I touch your face. Wandering, slow. 

Once I saw her, bent over a book, between her hands, only a book, and she looked up and met my eyes and smiled, like a knife. 

[spendingallthistime]

journelles

5

6

7

8

9

TBW (apart frm the others): 

The first four, spanning the time before Olympus. 

Scene with the council 

Scene with Athena (need details abt this) 

Pris/Zeus 

Maybe an intermediary W the fae 

[spendingallthistime]

“Hell of a day to be travelling,” the bus driver told me when I showed her my ticket stub. There’d been a snowstorm in the middle of the night. 7 inches. Maybe more.

I think I smiled at her. “There’s a cold snap coming,” I agreed.

The frost drains colours dry of themselves and the roads have vanished completely under the white-field of snow. I put the seat as far back it would go, pulled out the dullest Reader’s Digest in my bag, and thumbed through it, tried to turn off my mind, get the insistent press of the last few weeks out of my head. I fell asleep midway through Building My Own Toolshed.

Gran’s voice in my head: “Let it go. Let more go.” I’m holding onto nothing, and I’m holding onto dreams.

Dreams only hide something deeper, deaf, mute. If you’re lucky, something invented, moments of grace, a sustained flight, the flash of teeth in sudden, white smile. If you’re unlucky, then, well, people make mistakes. I’ve seen it happen. Mine is thinking I’ve any right to think about her at all.

Want is like that, though. It’s no use not wanting.

My head throbs. Slow throb-throbs. There’s a pounding quality to the pain that keeps time with my pulse.

I can feel his eyes on me in this empty bus and when I catch sight of my reflection the anger in my gaze startles me. It doesn’t matter. I’m doing my penance. I’ve made up my mind: I’d reach through my own skin for absolution, but that’s the last place I’m going to find it. He’s waiting for me, and I don’t know where I’m going but I know where I’ll end up.

I remember, I held my fingers up to the plate glass and the light of the moon shone through my fingers.

[spendingallthistime]

And yet there are other days, when everything remote does return to mind, and the thought of sleep, no matter how welcome, how desirable, feels entirely unthinkable, absurd, that I find myself at my desk, late at night, flipping through Athena’s copy of Poe’s poems. I flip through to her favourite, the Raven, read till the very middle. To the only panel she’s circled. Athena, whom I’ve never known to have sullied a book in her life, lined one panel in the same forceful pen she uses to write me letters. 

The raven’s gentle knocking has penetrated the quiet, Poe’s been woken and they’re sitting there looking at one another, and you can feel the time accumulating. It’s an uncertain feeling, gray and formless, like waking from an anonymous dream and trying to remember and take it back and have it for yourself again. 

The last stanzas of the poem, something about silk curtains in the dark, much about a bird’s shadow, stretched across the wall in the light of the lamp and Poe says: “Prophet! Thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil! By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—” 

In a blackout, I catch sight of you, we turn to each other, your shadow darkening a shifting length of ground, dressed as though for a journey, waiting for me, and I call out to you, as people call out to a stranger whom they’ve mistaken for someone they know; I feel strangely vigilant as though if I were to pay close enough attention, you might disappear, putting a stop to the dream, and so I don’t make to look at you. We stay like this. 

I think, these days, of you. I’ve been dreaming of you for months. I meet your eyes in the dark, because it’s all that we can both see at the same time, and longing rears up in me, flickering back into flame. 

I’m walking around with want in a constant state of alert, a chafing sense of waiting, and still, this feverish rise inside of me is alive, this tearing pull, so strong, I’m beginning to become certain it’s bigger than me, bigger than my years in the world which preceded your coming, and the eternity to which I will continue before you. 

I am writing to you, all the time, I’m writing. 

[spendingallthistime]

On my birthday, a few days ago, I sat on the balcony and watched the sun come gliding over the ridge with its unfurling of light and dispel what was left of the fog above the water.

I’ve turned 19. I’m thinking of an early summer. I’m thinking of wet dust, the way it smells after a first rain. Pouring water, down the empty wooded lot behind our house, past the gnarled, knotted Maple, past where the trail I’d run ended.

A year, two, before it blew up, all of it, going up in a flash like a stupid hope, I’d wait till Gran slept in the afternoons, walk lightly out of the door, and hit the ground running.

I’d figured I’d need something to keep me out of my own head, and I must’ve needed it bad, because once I’d found a pace, I was out running five, six times a week. Gran stopped being able to sleep in the afternoons, and then I was out in the mornings, and late at night, when there’d be no one on the paths. I’d run so hard that my heart felt like it would fold. My blood throbbing in my head; a beat, a rhythm.

I didn’t realize it then, but I was learning a new way to be quiet. There was me in school, alone, that was one way. There was me, standing in the lot behind the house, from where I could see Gran, but she couldn’t see me, that’d been another sort, because I’d be farther from her and more likely to be by myself. There’d been opening the window halfway while it rained so that my face grew wet when I lay down underneath it, with my head propped uncomfortably in the crook between the wall and the bed, so that stiffness came slowly, like a migraine and it seemed to me then like the sky was rousing itself from some profound slumber. There’s how I’d hide when I saw someone I recognized, how I sometimes liked to listen to the phone ring until it stopped. Silence a billion times bigger than I am, bigger than I was, that’s so loud, it comes singing out of my bones, seizes me the way wick seizes flame. The light lancing straight through me. The feeling before the visions started, and later, before they would come.

Gran, of course, knew less and less what to do with me.

One night I’m home too late and she’s sitting in the door, lit by lamp, and when I come in she stands, hard eyes on me.

She says my name, once, low and unsteady. Like it’s a question she’s asking me.

I remember standing over her, looking at the clean part of her hair and being overcome by that same pounding feeling, the premonition that something was about to change and I was scared, I realized, senseless, and she put her arms around me.  

When I dream of her, she wears dirt, goes knocking on doors, searching for me. There’s longing so intense, I wake up, and those nights I don’t sleep again and I don’t remember what I dreamt of until much later.

Olympus is a child’s picture book dream of a city.

The twelve Gods have formed what they call a council, and when I first heard it called that I laughed out loud while they looked me in the face.

There, on the mountain, they toss mortals around like curses, watching, not hearing, they want it so, and so it is, haphazard strokes of divinity, like waving a brush in the dark.

Zeus’s gaze lingers, still, and Hera’s resentment is plain on her face when she looks at me.

It’s all in the lips and eyebrows, and the set of his nose; I’m certain that if he could set me on his knee and hold me there, that he would. Revulsion rises like bile in my throat, and it’s all I can do to look away.

While I laughed in their faces, Athena watched me, her eyes flat and still as stone, with an expression that betrayed nothing.

There’s hunger there, for something, I’m certain; pain or power or retribution and my heart flutters strangely in my chest, accelerating against my will when she obliges me with a cool smile.

I turned once, to look at her again before I left, and when our eyes met, the desire I saw there was so overwhelming that the air turned to an anvil above my head and I strained underneath its weight.

Worry about that, God King.

There is, in the soul, a desire for not thinking. For quiet stillness. When I look at Hades, I’m struck by his disquiet. To whom does he pay the unrest he owes?

At night, I lay awake, and turn, looking into the cool dark. Mine, I pay to a life I’ve never lived, and cannot live. To whom does a God look? Where does he turn? I don’t wonder, but tonight, I can’t help myself.

When I have visions of him, I search his face.

Poseidon unnerves me. He smiles a sudden, wide open smile, full bodied and warm and I recoil. I don’t like the familiarity. Visions of him are tinged by the same air of unreality as a dream, he’s a dreamanchor, I see a siren, children, an implacable need for something he’s never had.

Ares attempts brutishly to ensure my complacency. Demeter makes passes at friendship.

I suppose it is a small comfort that Aphrodite no longer attempts to speak to me, though she smiles a secret half-smile as though we’re friends everytime I enter a room. Her teeth are uniquely disconcerting in their white-ness, which I’d bet good money is the intended effect. What would a Goddess bet, I wonder? Athena would know.

Hermes has made several jokes to me in passing, each more irritating than the last. A procession of Prophets, soles callused, hands roughened by sun, folded in supplication, walking barefoot to somewhere, I know better than to think I could do your job but one more conspiratorial throw-away grin, and I’ll retire a monk.

This is what I know: those to whom the Gods grant nothing are free.

My mentor, Gothel, is unwavering in her brutality and cold, when she looks at me it’s like I’m some remote thing she’s viewing over a great distance. I trust her, the way the shared nature of an ordeal can make two people trust each other.

When she reaches for my hand, I hold it and squeeze until her bones pop. She smiles.

[spendingallthistime]

Gothel has died.

Let me start here: I am as cold as I have ever been. Two days ago, through the mist on the panes, I watched a crow settle on the maple outside, its dripping wings spread out like laundry against the night sky. Everything was gray. Not a dull, washed-out gray like the gray one sees in the dust or in paintings. But a cool gray, which seemed to breathe, to expand the longer I stood there. 

The water, under its stain of stars, and the moon’s pronounced brightness in the absence of the light, a last night near the window, outside— 

Another hour, hours, one, three, five: Gothel spoke in the light of dawn.

“Come,” she said to me, and I was overcome and afraid of her and willing all at once. 

“We know the past, and do not pass. Isn’t it inevitable? Now that it’s behind us, isn’t it inevitable? Will exhausts itself, and then, turns, seeking—” Her hands were frantic. “Priscilla,” she said, “I want to spare you. From dreams. From the love that kills.” 

EDIT: prophets here before us, read their lives like signposts on the road and find  that each one of us is here because somebody before us did something to make it possible/way to survive

If I’d have been able to speak, then, I’d have lost my senses, I felt a violent sweep of wind, a rising howl, cold so intense it was like being beaten back. I’m shrinking, inward, trying to draw my senses away from the surface of my skin, muscles pulling away from bone, and time passes, I’m 15 again, and Gran’s breathing is shallow and she’s trying to tell me something important and I can’t understand her, I raise a hand and the accompanying shaft of pain makes me wince, forces me back. 

Gothel is dying, I’m sitting by her, and there’s pity on her face, I realize. 

The last thing she tells me is: “Run.” 

I am to love a God, and to have the love of two others. 

I am to bear two children, one of whom will be the Essence. 

I will hold them once. 

Far away, I can hear some kind of noise, but it’s too late to think about it: sleep is pulling me under, the tide building in the space behind my eyes, I’m thinking of cataclysm, I’m thinking of the boiling sea, the dream in which the leaves fell from the tree all at once—more than anything I want to disappear into the dark. I want to vanish from memory.