"Diodorus Siculus relates the story of a broken and scattered god; who of us has never felt, while walking through the twilight or writing a date from his past, that something infinite had been lost?"
-Paradiso, XXXI, 108, Jorges Luis Borges
There exists, in a realm that rests safely within the dreaming world, a prince who wed a witch. She is quite beautiful, the witch queen, her skin a pale reflection of the snow upon the pauper's grave, her eyes the rose, and her smile the words erased by the passing of time. The prince remarks upon this often, as if her beauty somehow dispels her raven's blood; he forgets that her beauty is her blood, and that in the end she is both the crow and the woman.
Heart filled, he finds her beside the window, wearing black, her bare feet resting gently across the stone sill as her garnet eyes search the face of the indifferent moon. She does not turn to him and he thinks, dimly, thinly, that he is losing her somehow—that somewhere in the words, his Rue has left him for the world resting in the heavens. He never was one for extensive thought, though, and it slips away soon. He is left only looking at her.
She is Helen's rue, her starry-eyed regret as she looked down at the world she had destroyed with her beauty. She is the face of the moon where once there had only been the scorching sun and man's mad desire to fly. When she looks at him, he sees only something that has existed after something else—only an end, not a fable.
He changes so often that he finds it hard to look in a mirror. His face never seems to stand still; his thoughts roam through his eyes and his emotions scar his flesh. For this reason, he often doesn't meet her eyes.
"I had a dream about Fakir," she says absently, not to him but to the night and her own raven's blood. She doesn't ever say things to him—she only smiles. He knows this. Every time he thinks it, a shard of his heart aches and threatens to split, so he tries not to think it.
"We were walking along the garden path; the windows acted as mirrors, reflecting only what we wanted to see. He looked different, not quite older but not younger either—perhaps sharper is the best word, as if he had turned into that enchanted sword he borrowed from you." She turns to him with passive interest, as if he is merely the tool to be used to prop up her speech.
"How was he?" the prince asks, almost in spite of himself. She shrugs and looks out the window once again. Her face reflects the yellow moon's loneliness. The prince finds himself thinking of that other world he left behind, the world that was little more than a fog for him, less real than the intangible dreams he has at night when his heart melts into nothingness and the world slips from his fingertips.
"He wore Drosselmeyer's old cape and hat; the feathers almost concealed his face. I asked him where on earth he found it, and he said that it had been waiting in his closet. I asked him what I would find in my own closet and he said, 'raven feathers'. It was almost twilight in the garden, but something of the sunshine still remained because I could see the grim color in his eyes. 'Things have changed,' he said. 'Duck and I are the only ones left now'. Except I didn't know what he meant."
"Did he say anything else?" This time the prince wants to know because he can see it; he can see those things that she isn't quite saying. They're hiding beneath the surface—like the heart shards, his heart shards dancing beneath the skin of so many people, playing them like marionettes.
Her back is still to him, as if she, too, is searching for that world she left behind for him, for everything she had ever known and loved. She doesn't belong to the place where she belongs; that world had forsaken her, and she had left it behind for him, for everything.
"Oh yes. He had a lot to say, considering it was only a dream."
He wants to sit beside her, feeling again that aching rip in his heart. Loneliness, he calls it, he thinks it—but he isn't quite sure. He never is quite sure. Rue always knows what she is feeling, Rue is her feelings: she is the loneliness and the pain, the sorrow and the rage. She is all those heart shards lost in his soul, and somehow because of that, he feels he doesn't know her at all.
"What did he say?" he asks again, but even before he asks he has that feeling, intuition, Fakir called it, that Rue isn't going to answer.
She smiles and her silent words shake his soul.
She takes his hand and leans against him, abandoning her windowsill and her yellow moon for the moment, perhaps recognizing that they are only a story (not real) and that he is the only real (not real) thing there is in this world. He holds her close, the heart shard fear screaming in his chest, just as it did when Tutu walked away from him with those sorrowful (accepting) blue eyes. He doesn't want to lose her; he feels that if he loses her—intuition again—that if he loses her, there will be nothing left but words and heart shards and ravens.
(In the night, the yellow moon smiles down at him. He can't help but shudder.)
They walk together down the corridor in perfect unison. Her eyes are not on his but rather on the stone floor. Their path is lit by candle light, and to the prince, the shadows almost look like crows, red eyes centered in the flames as their black feathers stretch onto the ceiling. Rue has always been surrounded by crows; there were crows everywhere before, always watching her, watching him. Crows and crows feathers, watching avidly from the walls and ceiling.
The curiosity suddenly wants to know what she edited. Surely there are things left unsaid; he wants to know why she said only what she said and what she left behind in the world of dreams.
They are in the bedroom now. He is clutching her in vain; his hands tangle in her midnight hair as he watches her slip away into that world of dreams. A dream within a dream, he thinks vaguely, a thought that reminds him of his own dream within a dream, that terrifying world called reality, which houses the writer (whom he has almost forgotten) and the Duck (whom he wishes he could forget). He sees when she leaves him, when her soul departs and he is left with a shell, a sleeping doll. Her hands relax and her face becomes numb and indifferent; her hair becomes limp in his hands and she is covered in shadows.
He is a guest in her dream within a dream, yet somehow he sees it in his mind's eye—like the crow sitting in the tree he watches her, and his eye is the only thing moving. It is twilight again; the earth is melting into the sky and he can't seem to find the borders between life and death. She's wearing scarlet, her satin shoes are black, and she walks hand in hand with Fakir, who wears his grandfather's clothes.
"I know it was you," she says accusingly, as if it is somehow his fault and that his pen truly does hold power over both life and death. He doesn't smile (as Drosselmeyer would have, no doubt), but he does pause and regards her carefully, as if she is something not to be trifled with.
Tyger, tyger burning bright, thinks the prince as he watches from his perch in the tree.
"Do you regret it?" he asks. He sounds different—sharper, perhaps. The prince can see that his hands are stained with ink and that his eyes are harder than they used to be.
"It was supposed to be her; she was supposed to be the princess. Every day I wake up and I think it's her in my place, and that I'm still just a crow, just a girl everyone's forgotten about. He killed her because of me—he didn't give her a second thought because of me. I wake up and there are crow feathers in my hair and nothing, nothing there is real, nothing lasts." She pauses for a breath and looks around her, as if terrified by her surroundings, as if this twilight world is only a cage that she gilded for herself.
"Reality's harder than this." God answers carefully—because he is something of a god, isn't he?
"You're right, reality is harder than this. But the world I live in is nothing more than this—just an image printed in words. There was something greater in that other world, something lasting, something that I have lost. In my world there is everything: there are witches and sorcerers, dragons and fae… and princes. There are princes, too."
God in the feathers with the ink stained hands looks at her as if she has transformed (as if she hasn't changed at all). He doesn't smile, but then, Fakir never was one for smiling.
"He's only a doll, Rue. You can't expect anything more from him."
"What do you mean?"
The prince can almost see the sword in his hand, almost like Fakir had never managed to drop it despite all his pretty words and his ink stained papers. He was the knight who tried but could never quite do it, the knight whose destiny was to be torn in half, crumpled like paper stained by useless words.
"You know what I mean, Rue. When you look at him, what do you see? I see something quite different, just as Duck sees something different. I see a foil, I see something that serves only to support that which is real. By himself he is nothing. He is only what we tell him to be, and if he thought at all, if he existed at all, it was only because Duck thought he should."
In what distant deeps or skies burnt the fire of thine eyes? The forest is growing darker, and the prince finds he has trouble making out their forms; they have blurred together in his own apathetic fog. The twilight is fading, yet the twilight is what blurs them together, not the darkness. In the orange-gold light he sees the reflection of his own eyes; he has to turn from the sight of that half-lidded eye in the horizon for fear that he might see himself reflected there.
He sees the girl dancing there—not Rue, but the other one, the one he noticed only dimly. Fakir's princess. The light steps softly through her red hair and the twilight plays across her features with a careless joy that the prince could only blink at softly. His heart breaks inside his chest against the weight of his old sword. She looks so young, too young, much younger than he remembered her being. He wants to call her name, but along the way he has forgotten it. Now he only retains a shadow of those eyes, those blue eyes that gleamed like twin moons.
"He was your friend," Rue states as if words were supposed to mean something important.
"Yes, but only because I told him he was."
The girl is dancing beneath his tree. The prince hardly notices the conversation, he is so entranced by her bare feet and her carefree smile. This girl is different, this is the girl he did not see—the girl he glanced over with her bright laughter and her blue eyes. He can't remember her name, but he needs to call her because she is all he has forgotten, all that was once real in the world. Time shifts delicately beneath her feet and the twilight surrounds her as a halo.
He sees then the dread hand, the dread feet, that it is Fakir's hand upon her shoulder. He sees then the feathered God, the green lizard upon his back, and he understands the infinite and the machinery of the world.
In the world of the dream, the nameless prince sees the tyger.
He falls from the tree like a crow. Somehow, he manages to laugh as his feathers float gently down above him.
He wakes up shivering. Rue is asleep in his arms, and the moon is smiling, smiling, smiling down upon him.