gārod (n.) the sensation that deep down that there is a part of you that is fragmented and lost and cannot be replaced but with that thing for which you are "gārod".
Overhead, the sky embraced all. All that was falling or flying was held tight in a strangling embrace, and those stars, which did neither, were being squeezed of all light, wrung out like ripe lemons and strung out like a necklace through the inky dark as a warning to any that might dream of following them to ignition. Who would dare?
Someone had. Someone must have. Had the curses all shone so, before combustion?
Maryam said, he's still breathing, I think he's still alive. Her head was haloed with gnats and the lingering mist of a winter yet too young to bite deep. Her headscarf was all stained with his blood, light splayed across the flats and angles of her face, which hovered over him, inquiring, searching him for contradiction. Was he meant to sit up and say no, you're wrong, I'm dead, I am breathing but I am dead?
Dead without knowing it. Dead man walking. He had known it all his life, and watched it advance slowly, like the advent of harvest season and the approach of the reaper with his scythe onto a blighted field swathed with dead land. This now, here, was merely the gleaning.
Could he say I told you so?
Did he still have a mouth to weep with? He must have had eyes, for he could still see Maryam, blood-streaked. He could barely hear her, for the way the ocean roared its dissatisfactions in his ear, a voice of nothing, this big hush, like arsenic rain falling on a tin roof in Txori District. All else was a tight knot of something that went beyond mere agony, that wracked the body and cracked the bones and drove from his lungs and throat all breath, any instinct to scream. Not a human being, not anymore – this was the bottom. It was what he had feared.
He had faded; he had returned.
Even in this moment, her sorrow seemed Midas-touched, somehow the more beautiful for how hollow it was, like she was looking at a stained piece of fabric, a broken toy, an ink blotch on lined paper. It was despicable, how beautiful she was, regarding him with that awful star-studded gaze of hers.
The only legacy his father had left him was a name that would get him killed and the only legacy his mother had left him was a song, whispered jaggedly thus: when is a monster not a monster? oh, when you used to sing it to sleep; oh, when you are the reason it is so mangled.
She looked at him, mangled thus, and looked away again.
She said, what's this about a xrafstar, and She said, it's a pity when I was hoping for a vivisection, and She said, fetch Mother, fetch Priscus, and tell them that the kingdom, that the kingdom, that the kingdom –
She had turned away and the world was dark again. This was how he died. For all that – just a druj – the boy who had been Krzysztof was inclined to disbelieve it, though he could feel how hollow his veins, how empty his chest. Just a druj. After all this time? He would have laughed, if he still had a mouth, if he still had lungs.
Overhead, the sky embraced all. He felt like he was falling or flying, held tight and squeezed of all light. Åsmund was being forced from the room, and fighting it, and losing, shouting for the dead man. Maryam's hand was torn from his; she followed her lover, though she fought as he had, and screamed as she went that he was still breathing, Oroitz Txori was still breathing, and he wasn't dead yet.
You wanted a better story, didn't you? Well, who wouldn't? These words, shrapnel in his brain, leaking from him like all else had. He had always felt like a knife wound in Illéa's canvas, a cruel reminder of the reality lurking outwith the walls. Shouldn't he have died thus? A knife under the ribs, confidently placed, Her hand gripping the hilt and saying, ah, third strike, failed three times, I did tell you, I did warn you.
It might have been a moment later, or hours later, or days, but then he was being hoisted upwards and something was being put to his lips, some black liquid thick with chunks of something awful, and someone over his head was saying, he may not survive, they don't always survive, initiation is an awful thing and he is alone, it is hard to go through alone. Someone had put a scalpel to his arm; he barely noticed it.
What was a little more agony?
People were crowding around him. With what little vision that was left to him – ah – he saw that the girl leaning over him was not Asenath or Maryam or Sahar or his mother; it was not even Ignacja, which he had not realised that he had expected until he saw that it was not. It was a girl with a cropped bob, with flower tattoos crawling across her bare arms and twining with her collarbones. Most of her face had rotted away; mushrooms sprouted from what had once been her eyes; wild flowers overspilled her teeth and ribs. She said, indistinctly, stop, they'll hear.
Stop. They'll hear.
Stop? He couldn't stop. He wanted to live.
He hadn't realised until just now how desperately he wanted to live.
She said, again, stop.
Stop.
Stop.
The sky faded overhead. Stop, she said, and he obeyed.