Note: I would like to make it very clear that the section headers/breakers are lines taken from Leonard Cohen's song "Avalanche" and therefore not written by me. Absolutely no familiarity with the song is required to read this, but I do recommend listening to it at some point because it is beautiful and horrifying. In that vein, this is probably the most depraved thing I have ever written, so...uh...enjoy.
Shadow of My Wound
He was ten years old, and so were you. You committed a murder together.
You found the man who could help you, whose name was rarely uttered where it might be overheard but was nevertheless known well among the nobility. You always knew how to whisper the right whispers. It was said he could get you anything you wanted — poisons, assassins, anything at all — so long as you could meet the price. When you asked him to bring you a boy, you expected questions, but he only had one:
"What kind of a boy?"
Four feet tall. Pale skin. No deformities.
"Hair? Eyes?" he asked.
"Bleach the hair. The eyes do not matter," you replied, and your brother shifted on his feet beside you.
He had your request met within the week. The boy was a bit dirty, a bit skinny, but that could be fixed.
"Are you hungry?" you asked, but the boy said nothing.
"He does not speak," said the man.
Good. Very good. "I see. He will do, I suppose." The eyes were green, the face all wrong, but the face would not be important.
"So we have a deal?"
"Indeed. My brother shall see that you are paid in full." Beside you, Charles chewed on his lower lip.
"Stop that this instant," you hissed under your breath as you turned toward him. "You are to be our face. Mind what you show to the world. Now," you raised your voice, "would you be so good as to pay the gentleman what he is owed?"
"It would be my pleasure, brother." He looked into the man's eyes.
I stepped into an avalanche. It covered up my soul.
Later, after you had the lice pulled from the boy's hair, some flesh put on his bones, and all the other telltale signs of poverty and malnourishment sufficiently hidden beneath warm baths, perfumes, and manicures, you led him into the forest. He followed obediently, no longer knowing any more than you did who he was, who he had been, how he had come to be here. He only knew of two boys who had been kind to him, who kept him well-clothed and well-fed, whose servants brought him sweets and amusements, bathed him with scented oils, and built fires in his room to keep the winter out. He never knew to fear. What came next should have been easy.
"Go on," you told your brother.
But his face was white. "I don't want to," he whispered. "You do it."
"You have to."
"Why? It was your idea. You do it."
"It has to be you," you said. "This is just the beginning, brother. There will be many more." For the first time, you felt the seeds of doubt beginning to take root. "If you can't do this, then we will fail. And it will all have been for nothing."
"I can't…" he was muttering to himself. "Brother, I can't..."
"Do it."
And even as he continued to protest (I can't, I can't), he did. You found yourself entranced by the moment as you watched it: the indomitable will, victorious, breaking the errant chains of conscience. When he finally struck the blow, he struck it quickly and without further hesitation. The knife entered one side of the boy's neck and exited the other before tearing through the throat with a great spray of blood. This is the first battle, you thought. Not the butchery of some urchin boy, of course. No, it was God's first angel you and he had met there that day — the angel of fetters, of self-sabotage, of the great insulting lies of good and evil. It was this angel who now lay slain. Our first triumph. It has begun.
Almost immediately, your brother weakened again, but this time it was no matter. The deed was done; the victory was decisive. Admittedly, the sheer quantity of blood in the boy had alarmed even you, though Charles had taken the better part of it. His entire face was splattered red, and he spat several times on the ground.
"I told you to keep your mouth closed, didn't I?" you chided. "You do not listen, brother."
You realized he was crying, and you almost felt sorry for him. Such battles were necessarily, but they could be exhausting. Still, work remained to be done.
"Save your tears for the funeral, Charles. Your brother does lie dead, after all. Cry all you wish for him. But who will believe this filthy gutter rat to be your brother?"
He knew what had to be done, and it filled you with pride when he lifted the rock from the soil and brought it down upon that all-wrong green-eyed face. Again and again he brought it down, until, you mused, the corpse indeed could almost be your own.
But then you heard him say, "I'm sorry." He whispered it quietly, guiltily, as if he hoped you would not hear. A lie. You almost let it enrage you, but you stopped yourself.
"What are you apologizing to?" you asked calmly instead. "This corpse? This meat? There is nobody here to be sorry to. There is only us two, and you have done us a great good. I am deeply grateful to you, dear brother."
You took the knife from him then and, extending his arm out toward you, cut deeply his palm. He bit his lip but did not cry out. You extended your own hand, carving into it before pressing your palm to his.
"Now turn around," you said softly, and he obeyed. When the knife entered the flesh of his shoulder, he did scream, falling to his knees as you tore a long gash across his back. As the blood began to spread, you felt a surge of dread; perhaps you had cut too deep. But he rose again on trembling legs, and you said, "Now go. Hurry. Tell them what has been done to you. Tell them what has been done to your dear brother."
As he ran, droplets of blood splattered the grass beneath his feet. Like morning dew. Our morning. Our beginning. You looked down at your hand where the knife had bitten into it. The wound was already gone. As if it had never been. Had you not known better, you might never have supposed that half the blood that dried there now was your own.
When I am not this hunchback that you see, I sleep beneath the golden hill.
He was thirteen years old, and you were dead. They buried the body beside your mother, beneath a sepulchre of rubies and gold. No questions were asked. No questions were ever asked. Deep in the earth, a stranger wore your name, your bones. But you got to keep your face. It was a face you might wear forever, should it come to that. Should everything go wrong.
That was your first regret: that you had given up your name too soon, kept your face too early. Your brother was changing. He was growing tall, his voice deepening, his face taking the angles of manhood. Your contractor, selfishly ravenous for the solace of the grave, had never warned about the way your bones would fight against you. Not the ones that lay unchanging in the earth, the flesh now certainly gnawed from them by worms, the soil draining them of all residual life until they lay bleached and insoluble. Those bones would never grow, and you envied them when yours began to tear at your flesh, to revolt against the power you had so greedily seized. Every moment they ached within you, thrashing furiously against the the stubborn equilibrium of immortality.
You are unnatural, they screamed as your skeleton bit at your fingertips and the soles of your feet. Your spine lengthened and compressed itself over and over. You deformed and reformed, again and again and again, with no end in sight. Why do you not let us grow?
You who wish to conquer pain: you must learn to serve me well.
For the first year, every moment was agony. You could not think, could not plan, could not dream. You could only scream and scream as your brother looked on helplessly, maturity descending gracefully upon his unhindered frame, while you remained violently stagnant. A garden began to bloom within you. In a dark place he could not see, bitterness, resentment, and regret sowed their seeds and grew like nightshade, like deadly mushrooms.
After the first year, you learned how to live with it, how to hide your grimaces and swallow your screams and let your will carry you where your legs refused. In the end, you won. Your brother was thirteen, and you were still ten, and your body gave up on the notion of change. The pain subsided and did not return, and you finally held forever in your palm.
Still, your garden grew.
You strike my side by accident as you go down for your gold.
He was a grown man, and you were still a child. You did not care for his women, but you tolerated them, until there was one you could not. She was seventeen — hardly even a woman. A little girl was all that one really was. A silly little girl who did not know where to draw the line.
Everything was funny to her. A grand joke that nobody else was in on. You saw the laughter in her eyes when he told her, in gross defiance of your own injunction, of your plan. But your brother did not notice it. She was more like you than she was like him, you thought. Not truly like you, of course. You could see plainly she cared nothing for your brother, cared nothing for anyone or anything at all. She had no dreams, no vision, no desires beyond her own amusement. It was all child's play to her, and he was one of her toys. That made you one of her toys as well because you were him and he was you, and it enraged you like you never knew anything could. But you were certain that she had never wept after cutting a throat, never looked back or whispered I'm sorry, and in that way, she was more like you than she was like him.
He never questioned her. You never did anything but. What is this creature? you wondered every time you saw her. What drove such a monster to smile, simper, and seduce? What does she want?
She was common-born, though not too common. By her own telling, she had been born into middling wealth and plenty enough comfort, an easy path to a life that would never lack for anything. But such a life of dull security held no interest for her, so she had ran away at fourteen and become an assassin's lover. You suspected her for a liar and told her as much, but she only laughed. She laughed like a windchime.
"We conspire to slay the lie itself. Why would I lie about such petty matters? I have nothing to fear from the truth."
You doubted her story still, but as time went on, you found yourself doubting her less with each day until you knew it could be little but fact. She knew how to kill like nothing you could have ever believed. And besides, she was contracted. Code holders only ever sought the most ruthless or the most vulnerable, and vulnerable she was not.
That is what she wants, you realized not long after. Killing mere men had fallen beneath her. It had bored her, and boredom was the only enemy she knew. She longed to kill kings, to kill gods, to deliver the punchline to that cosmic joke that always had her laughing.
The thought brought into your mouth such a vile taste that you spat. She was nothing like you at all. There was nothing else in the world quite like the monster that she was.
The cripple here that you clothe and feed is neither starved nor cold.
The worst part, you thought, was not that he was beginning to need her, but that he had let himself believe that she needed him.
Your brother felt himself a puzzle with a missing piece, you knew. A missing piece that you yourself held, that you had always held, that you offered and offered, yet he insisted on declining time and time again. A man born with another half, bound to him in the water of the womb, was one who never had to seek, yet you watched him start to pine for everything except that which you could give. Everything but the perfectly-fitting piece you held. You could tell he still missed your mother sometimes, but she had never loved you as she had him. The only thing she had given you was life, and that you had given him, too, and kept giving and giving and giving.
Nobody who hated lies ought to believe in love. It was the greatest lie of all, the mother of lies, the king of lies. You knew this as you watched her tease the life from him, little by little. All that you gave to him, she took and took and took. And he let her. It was madness. It was sickness. It was the real joke, the real punchline, and there was nothing funny about it.
He does not ask for your company, not at the center, the center of the world.
She took and took, but then she gave him the throne. For her troubles, she got to kill a king. It might have been sweet to watch your uncle take a bullet between the eyes, but it was all soured because she was the one who got to do it. And she pretended that she was doing it for him, for your brother, but you knew better. You knew better. She only ever did anything for herself. To relish the simple fact that she could. She has killed one king now, you thought. How long before she itches to kill another?
"She knows far too much," you told your brother after his coronation. "You ought to fix her."
For a moment, you saw rage come into his eyes — a rage that almost rivalled your own — but then he only laughed. "No, dear brother. I am going to marry her."
Then he ordered you away, and you could only wonder, after all you had done, after all you had given, how he had come to hold you in such contempt.
When I am on a pedestal, you did not raise me there.
She thought she could make you a piece in her little game, too. You had no illusions about what she saw when she looked at you. She thought you repulsive, hilarious, a sideshow freak. Now that she had your brother wrapped around her finger, she fancied herself the ringmaster. Like hell, you thought whenever you noticed the laughter that never left her eyes turning itself onto you once again. Play your games all you want, little girl. You will never, ever win. She may have built your brother's power, but she would never see that the foundation she built upon was your sweat, your toil. And your power, your strength: that was all your own, from the foundation to the summit. If she could not recognize it, well, you supposed that might be all the better in the end.
Your laws do not compel me to kneel, grotesque and bare.
Britannia was always so fond of the chess board, the great metaphor for realpolitik. But the metaphor was not a clever one. In reality, a queen might dress as a pawn, and a pawn might dress as a queen, and a king might never be the wiser.
I myself am the pedestal for this ugly hump at which you stare.
Go on, then. Watch me, little girl. Watch my eyes while I move my hands. Keep on laughing. I will show you how a game is played.
You who wish to conquer pain: you must learn what makes me kind.
She had never learned how to suffer, but the suffering she brought upon you in the years that followed rivalled even that of the war your body had waged upon itself so long ago. Just as your flesh had fought against you then, it was her flesh that now wrought havoc upon you, upon your plans. She entranced your brother with her kisses, her curves, her swift knife. But he was you, and you were him. What she had done was nothing less than wrench you from yourself, tear the face from the will that drove it that she might wear it herself, speak with its voice, wield its power. Your power.
She acted as if it were a kindness for her to tolerate you, to share with you the other half that you had grown with from your joint conception, that you had built and strengthened and disciplined alongside yourself. You stupid little girl, you thought. It has been I who has shared with you, made allowances for you, shown tolerance for you. And for far too long. She was but a lesson in half measures: allow a pawn to dress as a queen, and she will begin to believe she is one. Allow her to believe she is one, and she will begin act like one. Allow her to act like one, and all might be lost.
She had never learned how to suffer, and you decided you ought to finally teach her.
The crumbs of love that you offer me, they're the crumbs I've left behind.
There was no laughter in her eyes when she died. She fell with her head turned toward you, and you watched intently as she hemorrhaged, choking on her blood. It took only seconds, but you saw a great procession pass over her face: shock, anger, fear, desperation. All unfamiliar to her until now. All things she ought always to have known to feel in your presence. Dropping your gun, you walked over and knelt beside her.
Not so amusing now, am I, you cunt?
You stood up and placed your foot upon her head, turning her now-vacant face into the floor. Her hair was splayed out around her in a spreading pool of blood.
Are you laughing now?
Your pain is no credential here; it's just the shadow of my wound.
He was keeping secrets from you. You could tell. You first began to suspect as much after he sent her whelps away. When you learned of the scorn he had delivered upon the boy, even you were taken aback. At first, you wondered if he might truly have abandoned this foolishness of love, perhaps never truly cared for the woman at all. Certainly she had been hated by many, yet when you suggested he begin questioning them, he dismissed the notion.
"Dead is dead," he said with a wave of his hand. "I will not waste our time with such a petty pursuit as revenge or, dare I say, justice." He sneered the last word so bitterly that you knew for certain: something was wrong. "We shall proceed, brother. We keep moving forward, as we always have."
I have begun to long for you, I who have no greed. I have begun to ask for you, I who have no need.
They were words taken from your own mouth, but something his eyes alerted you that he did not speak them from your common mind. No, he was wearing your words, manipulating them against you. You and he had always been one being, from the very beginning. He had strayed, but you had made it your duty to rein him back into his true self. Instead he was drifting farther away.
You say you've gone away from me, but I can feel you when you breathe.
While you were still in the womb, the doctors discovered that he had been drinking your blood. By the time the unusual condition came to their attention, it had become so severe that they were astonished that you were not already dead. Instead, you survived against all odds and were born sickly and pale, your brother ruddy and robust with all the strength he stole from you. Yet you had never looked upon him as a parasite or yourself as a host. You saw instead a single creature, one that sustained itself. One that was made to survive.
Now you wondered.
Do not dress in those rags for me. I know you are not poor.
How dare you, you seethed as he turned his back on you and walked away. I made you.
Don't love me quite so fiercely now, when you know that you are not sure
Even in death, she kept her hold on him. She had won, and you could not fathom how. You could not touch her now. You could do nothing now but rage.
The day you killed her, you had believed a second angel conquered: the angel of love, the greatest lie of all. But you had only left it wounded, furious. Instead, the angel of love called upon its twin brother, hate, and it was together that they returned. Together, they wreaked their vengeance upon you.
It is your turn, beloved. It is your flesh that I wear.