…
Her soul breathed beneath the feet of those who walked the dusted stone corridors. They were warm, and they moved and lived and agonized in corners and halls and shadows where she could always press her curiosity against their heartbeats and listen to their life. An entire civilization lived within her doors and she coiled herself around them, thriving in the torches and fireplaces where they gathered. There she was warm and deep and as passionate as the endless thoughts they thought and the words they spoke.
Elsewhere, she was cold. So cold and so dark that no one lived and breathed there, except her favorites—her shadows that were darker than shadows— for they took their warmth into her forgotten parts and learned the walls and the doors and the windows that opened to other walls and other doors. Her favorites who effortlessly moved between her stone world and the supple world of the flesh. Each stone in her skeleton was etched with the memory of their boots and patrols. She had drunk their scarlet life when it was spilled from their bodies and memorialized it deep in her granite heart. Her favorites bloomed where others wilted. She listened to their life more than any other. Out of all her inhabitants, she had discovered that it was their hearts that beat the deepest, yet it was their hearts that stopped the quickest.
For there was always at least one—one who wore their hearts as a yolk. For generations she'd watched those hearts fall and split and die for that one who wore silver chains about his head. Her favorites flitted in and out of her shadows like mortal extensions of herself, but these ones had nothing to do with her—their skin smelled of saltwater and sand—and yet they kept themselves bound to her. So many lives rose and fell beneath her watch, and she was most aware of these ones. This is why she stood above the roads and shops that huddled near her, why she ranked as most important among all. These ones defined her existence.
Recently there had been two, until the day she swallowed and spat out of the blood of the eldest. And now there was only one. He preferred to stand on the roof, so far up that she could hardly feel his feet on her skin. Many of his kind seemed blind to the burdens and chains dragging behind them; this one saw nothing else. They were trapped together, she and him. It comforted her to know that there was another that bore the scars and stains of death and duty, but he held them near his heart where they easily maimed him. His sorrow fell in his wake and dimmed the light she thrived on. But he had dogs. They tickled her with their feet and fur, but their ecstatic energy followed behind this one like a river wherever he went, like a balm on burned flesh.
And she knew how he pined for the girl—the green one, that green girl. She herself loved the green ones, and she understood why he did—because it had nothing to do with love. The only sorrow she felt was for her paralytic legs. It was easy to look down on the hovels beneath her, but impossible to see above the horizon. She wished he'd show her what he saw when he stood on the roof, but somehow she knew he saw little more than she did. But the green ones—they flew beyond the horizon and when they returned, they were brighter, more scarlet, or more yellow, or more azure—each time different. She loved them because they tracked dirt and leaves and snow all over her monotonous corridors. Their hearts beat differently than others, like a piper interrupting a dirge. Though they dwelt beneath her watch, they weren't hers, not like her black shadows. No, the green ones graced her with their breath, damp with northern rains or southern humidity. And though she dwelt beneath his reign, the green girl wasn't his. She came and she went and she ran and she danced and he could only squint at the horizon and breathe the smell she brought back with her.
Yes, they were the same, she and him. They both loved the green ones, for their own sakes, and for their own emptinesses. Though that girl—the green one—wasn't just green. She was brilliant. She had tread in places even the shadows hadn't yet discovered, for deeper down, buried in her myriad secrets slumbered another type of cold—where those warm, elastic bodies had fallen silent and rested in her lowest bowels. Those she didn't want, but she held them tightly in the reaches of her body so far that even she didn't fully comprehend them. Her favorites walked there, and she trusted them to do all that she was unwilling to. She did not like empty bones or rotted flesh. It made her putrid, and so she turned away from it. But even as the saltwater one stood on her roof, something nipped at her feet. She paid it no heed, however. If her favorites were unconcerned, then she would be as well.
But the green girl had paid heed. She'd delved deeper than her deepest pits. She'd plummeted into the darkness beneath the darkest floors and when she emerged, her green was gone. Instead there was gold and another color she had never seen before. But she's seen it again—on the horizon, coming from the east. He stares at it too, sometimes, and his sorrow deepens.
The girl has gone there. He's afraid he'll never see the green girl again. She is afraid she'll never see that strange color again. But her legs are paralytic, and so she watches the horizon with him, and she lingers around torchlit conversations, and she smiles over her black shadows, and she stands, and she waits.