war on heaven

There are angels in muddy trenches on edge of the fourth sphere--angels pulling their wings tighter around themselves in order to ward off the cold; angels balancing rifle butts against the shoulder of their plate armor. Michael squints at a map; trying to read the spidery writing of dispatches by only the light of a gaslamp and his halo.

(Michael tired, Michael bone-wearied and his courage flagging but still walking among his brothers; clasping them on the shoulder and saying "look there, look--you can see the dawn coming" and then--Michael drawing his sword; leading them over the top with glorias on his lips, searching out Lucifer in the chaos of the field; pulled toward him like a compass to north.

Lucifer laughing when their swords ring out against one another's (the sound is a sound like thunder) and Michael--Michael wants to drop his sword and gather Lucifer into his arms, steal him away and back to that place where they were brothers; where they were one and whole and holy. But Michael has the corpses of his little brothers emblazoned on the backs of his eyes--their broken wings and bodies weight him down, the crown of heaven sitting heavy at his temples, so he only tightens his hand around his sword.

(The lie is that they are so evenly matched in battle that neither of them can gain enough upperhand to deliver the mortal blow. The truth is something closer to how Lucifer leaned in and snarled "did you miss me brother?" instead of reaching for his dagger, or the time Michael had his foot on Lucifer's throat and a sword poised to strike--and he froze there; shaking. How he turned away and launched himself at another rebel angel; leaving Lucifer to suck in a ragged breath and pick himself up out of the mud. In the chaos of battle who would notice if Lucifer attacked with less ferocity than he was known for; if unflinching Michael flinched?)

The battle ends with too many angels dead; their wings sullied and spread in the mud; Michael adds their bodies to the weight he carries.

(Michael is always tired now; Lucifer always calls him 'brother')

(the war drags on)

on the disciples

ANDREW
Peter’s younger brother, the sort of vague embarrassment of the family because what sort of son abandons an honest future in fishing to follow around a dirty hermit in a loincloth? (he eats locusts, Andreia. I don’t care if this Baptist claims to be a prophet, he can still eat food like a normal person.) Kind of a space cadet, loves religion more than is probably healthy. If his family had been wealthier, he probably would have been sent to rabbinical school, but instead he follows around every Joshua, Joachim, and Jephthah who claims to speak on God’s behalf.

I think the first to recognize Jesus as Messiah would have to be a little credulous, with Heaven on his mind.

What do you think of Mary Magdalene?

I think that—underneath centuries of Da Vinci Code style-conspiracy theories, being labeled a prostitute or a mystic, exalted above the disciples or placed beneath them, conflated with the other Marys or vilified in comparison with them or ignored entirely or reduced to an archetype, a symbol, something gold-leafed and enshrined or rebellion given flesh—underneath all that—

I think she was just a Jewish woman.

the early days

I have this crystal clear image in my head, of he week after Jesus' ascension--most of the lesser followers leaving, in ones or in pairs, making their goodbyes fondly and saying in an apologetic tone, my family, my fields, my household, I'm needed elsewhere--

(not one of them says, Jesus is gone, there is nothing more here. It is time to wake, and rise, and return to the lives we were living before this dream, this insanity seized us. It was always going to end. None of them say it, but it is implied, it is in their voices, unspoken.)

second-generation nephilim

probably the first generation angels would be like first-gen immigrants, who have a hard time adjusting to human culture and always referring to old-world traditions of total obedience and smiting and their proud culture of fratricide. the second-gen would grow up with only the stories, which they think about with a strange mix of amusement, disbelief and horror, because their parents are peculiar but kinda very frightening sometimes, you know? third-gen would take the stories less seriously, because didn’t grandpa and grandma go crazy towards the end, screaming about fire and destruction and the apocalypse that was supposed to happen years and years ago? a fourth-gen kid would scoff at the stories and say, “nah, i don’t believe in angels.”

#SUCCESSIVE GENERATIONS OF NEPHILIM FORGETTING THEIR HERITAGE     #the second generation trying to explain away their parents' wild-eyed fervent faith with a shaky laugh and a ''yeah my parents are religious     #nutjobs; don't mine them--let's go up to my room.''     #the third generation who knows only the shuttered expressions and tense body language of their parents when grandma brings up the charge     #of the heavenly armies in the battle for the eastern gate     #and some of them a weirdly fascinated--it's always the later generations that try to figure out their roots     #maybe secret societies start to form--grandchildren of nephilim all coming together to enact old rites     #(or what they think are old rites)     #and discuss the strangeness and divinity they are heirs to; the privilege of their bloodline and the righteousness of them     #they probably call it something terribly pretentious like the cabal of lucifer and refer to one another as morningstars     #but really this just mirrors the sects that developed even in the first generation--when the fallen warriors sought out     #other warriors; guardians to guardians; scribes to scribes; and they all observed and told of different ways and so     #the splintered leavings of heaven splinter further     #they are human now     #what else is there to do?

I’ve just got this image of an angel tugging exasperatedly at their hair and wailing “WHY?!”

humanity is confusing, though

like, they make all this art and music that doesn't seem to serve any purpose? not all of it praises god and a lot of the semantic content could be expressed in more effective and less labor-intensive ways?? even their unadorned communication is inexact and dependent on things like body language, tone of voice, context--what's even the point of having a language if the words won't stay where you put them???

and like, bodies??? bodies are weird, and humanity's relationship to their bodies is super weird--it's integral to your understanding of yourself but also not you in the truest sense; it's your point of access to the world but also part of the world and unreliable, really unreliable. angels don't really get that, they're all pure understanding and platonic knowledge, the idea that your mind could play tricks on you and that's normal, to not see everything or hear everything, to be constantly and consistently ignorant and have to learn things--

learning freaks them out. angels don't learn things. angels are.

(well--they aren't. that's part of the problem.)

but probably the most confusing thing about humanity is that humanity is charming. humanity crowds its way into the angels' non-space and humanity makes them be, makes them piecewise functions of beast and bird, writes entropy into an otherwise perfect system. And the angels are frustrated (emotions, those are new) and the angels muse wistfully about if humanity had never come (the subjunctive, that's new too) but humanity moves through a world of half-certain shadows singing, wearing divinity in its skin.

and angels ask why

(that's new too)

Who is your favorite angel?

GABRIEL always Gabriel because of all the narratives about angels, Gabriel’s leans closest to humanity. Gabriel who translates between the Word and the messy inexactitudes of human language—we are creatures of connotation and context; our vocabulary is slantwise, all ill-defined shapes and inexact transliterations. We barely understand one another, and yet angels are messengers, bending right angles into fractals just to try and express a fingernail of what the Lord said.

But Gabriel speaks; Gabriel bends low and whispers; Gabriel tries harder than any other to understand. And as a consequence I think Gabriel loves a little differently than the other angels, because human love is like human language—messy and inexact and shifting; powerful when wielded by one who knows its power.

Gabriel who is sent to deliver the good news to the Mother of God without sin; Theotokos and the Queen of Heaven—and gets Miriam of Nazareth instead.

(She’s slender and sun-browned and faithful, but not a queen—just a girl like any other from a backwater Judean town. And Gabriel basically follows her around for nine months trying to figure out how this human becomes the mystical figure the angels were told she was, where she’s keeping her grace and power and wisdom hidden.

It’s Gabriel’s hand she holds while giving birth—her nails would have drawn blood, if he had any—it’s Gabriel who laughs when she tells him the story of her friend’s wedding, the water into wine and her impertinent son—it’s Gabriel who holds her when the news of Yeshua’s arrest reaches Nazareth and it’s Gabriel who walks beside her on the long road to Jerusalem, to watch her son crucified.

She is still sun-browned and faithful, and Gabriel thinks maybe that is the point.)

on guardian angels

guardian angels who are young and green and uncertain, in over their head from the moment of their charge is born (all that screaming and blood and yet the mother smiles through her tears, kisses the forehead of the small, squalling thing and they don't understand but they feel the flaring of a new-born soul, and there is something there, something sensed slantwise and true)

guardian angels whose hearts leap into their throats when this infant falls asleep against the curve of their palm, when it grabs at their fingers and burbles happy noises that mean foodlovehomesafe. (it will never occur to these angels, so green and new, that they are partly responsible for the love-longing that humanity chases all its life) Guardian angels who rock their infant humans in their arms, whispering stories of earth's early seas and distant supernovas and the antics of their brothers, letting the child gum at the sleeve of their robe.

the city is full of wings

Every order of angels stakes out a hallowed ground, nesting in some exposed crevice of the city like their Columbidae cousins. The Ophanim like subway tunnels, the thrumming of them, the rush of air. The Cherubim prefer something a little more stately, expensive dining rooms where their oxen faces lip at the china plates, and their wings brushing back and forth lazily.

(Seraphs try not to fit more than two of them on the same plane of physical existence at once. It crowds out the quarks.)

The Dominions gather on the steps of the capitol building. One of them picked up a smoking habit from an alderman, and now they all carry those cardboard cases tucked in the folds of their palliums. You can see them there sometimes, lighting cigarettes with the fire of their swords.

The Powers like shipping yards, loading docks, late at night. They wrestle one another in the gravel, all six arms flailing, monstrous mouths laughing through bared teeth. The strength of the Lord likes a headlock, though it’s difficult when there are three heads. Principalities tend to congregate in the Art Institute—they trail through exhibits in twos or threes, brushing against people’s coat sleeves, speaking to one another in dead men’s poetry.

The low-level angels—the unaffiliated stragglers, loners, and miscellaneous celestial riffraff—find places wherever they can. Last month it was a hole in the wall Thai place where one of them was a server; the month before, it was the public library. They play card games in Starbucks and bless the baristas under their breath—sometimes when they’re gathered at the lakeshore, they like flashing their halos, distracting bikers and joggers.

Act your rank, the Virtues admonish them, when they see the mere angels giggling into their feathers.

Make us, the angels jeer, and race away laughing, their wings catching the wind like sails.

angels, unawares

some have entertained angels unawares, but others get this--seraphim crashing on your couch
(metaphorically of course; they wouldn't fit on a sofa) with their hundred hundred wings beating the air lazily; their beryllium eyes shut. "You should get a place," you may tell them over breakfast. "Not that you aren't always welcome; but don't you want somewhere to call your own?" But the seraphim merely blinks; eyes sparking; and goes back to coaxing the coffee maker not to burn your morning caffiene high

(they don't understand property you see; don't understand the concept of owning a piece of the dust--earth is humanity's birthright, and all else is god's)

(...yes even them; their wings, their eyes, the half-burnt coffee on their 7-dimensional tongue. You do not need to have a place of your own when you yourself are not your own, silly human)

(so the seraphim keep dragging themselves in at 2am, starlight caught in their feathers and whiskey on their breath--whispering ''are you up? are you up? the kingdom of god is at hand--come and kiss me,'' before collapsing back onto the sofa; wings fluttering in the angelic approximation of helpless giggles)

(...it turns out seraphim do indeed fit on the couch; with just enough room for one sleep-deprived human, waiting for the kingdom of god to arrive)

starlight and earth (2)

I was thinking about this today, about tauriel’s stiffness and seriousness when kili mentions having something down his trousers, her jittery confusion when kili teases about his “cursed talisman”—and how desperately he says “or not!” when she’s already walking away, how quickly he talks, just to get her back

(awkward darling children, she doesn’t remember how to laugh and he doesn’t know how not to be overlooked they’re so bad at this but then they’re talking about light and memory and moons, and that seems promising, like something that could flower under the warmth of your palm)

I was thinking about how broad kili’s fingers are compared to hers, when he takes the stone back from her, and how cool her hands feel against his fevered skin, and how she and fili keep vigil beside kili’s sickbed, and fili tells all the right stories—the ones only a big brother can tell, like when kili was forty and utterly convinced he was the next great nabla player, so the whole royal line of durin had to go around with cotton stuffed in their ears.

and sometimes kili wakes up and smiles at the both of them—a crooked, contented smile, his eyes half-lidded with sleep, and tauriel is warm, warm, warm.

(when they stand beside one another on the battlefield, and tauriel leans down and murmurs after this—after this we see the stars. promise me. I know you can be reckless.

and kili turns slightly, just enough for his lips to brush her jaw. I promise, he says, though his voice breaks against her skin. I promise. I promise. I promise.)

(it isn’t enough, in the end.)

the first time he lay with arwen, aragorn was a virgin.

oh, there had been offers--innkeepers' daughters (innkeepers' wives), a gondorian noblewoman or two, more than a few of of his brothers on the battlefield, and very notably an umbar princess, who had stayed his execution out of great affection--but for aragorn there had only ever been arwen, the memory of her on the banks of the bruinen, dark as oncoming night and with eyes of the first starlight.

(he learned to keep his own counsel, to leave quietly, to spare heartbreak.)

but it means that when arwen tugs at the stays of his trousers, he is suddenly twenty again, rawboned and helpless, uncertain how to catch the evenstar in his hands. I haven't--he breathes, and arwen goes still. none--none of them were you, I could not...le annon pân veleth nín, nín bereth.

but arwen smiles, tilts her face up to his and kisses the place where his jaw meets his throat. slow, then, that we might have love enough come morning.

it is a fumbling, over-eager thing--every move he makes seems clumsy, inelegant; his knees and elbows make nuisances of themselves; he finishes too quickly--but she is patient, invites him to touch and guides his hands, his mouth--

and when arwen evenstar gasps, nearly wrenching his hair from his head as her thighs press hot against his ears, aragorn thinks he may prove a quick study.

calypso

The sea is full of monsters and first among them is the sea.

Oh yes, she has her favorites--Odysseus and Gan Ning, Aruj and Edward, Jack, Davy. They are all witty; they are all empty. She fills them with herself, rimes their heartstrings with salt and teaches them how to wantwantwant like the pounding of the tides. She comes, and goes, loves and does not, for she is the sea and moves by her own secret currents. None may command her.

They try. They all say, at this point or that, fit here in my palm and fly to my hand; lick the blood and spars of ships from your teeth and cast your eyes downward, quiet your rage and quiet your hunger--there is too much in you, I do not like it; be warm and small and shallow for me, be there for me, be for me.

But her laughter is the sound of waves breaking and the hurricane-cracking of masts, and she tells them all no.

(they do not like her answer)

New Testament genderswap

New Testament genderswap—Saint Peter Petra

Petra, he calls you, the rock on which he will build his church. You are the daughter of fishermen and the wife of a shipwright, a mender of nets and a gutter of silver-scaled fish—yet the Son of HaShem presses the keys of Heaven into your pitch-rough hands. He promises you a priesthood and a temple; he promises you a crown and a city. He looks to you with eyes full with stars, and says such infinities will be yours to command.

You are not sure what he means you to do with them.)

I am not worthy, you finally say to him one night, when the heavens are bright and the fire is burning down to embers. Choose Johanna, she has a scholar’s mind—or Andreia, who is my blood, and first knew you for what you were. Even James has a courage and a fire that I do not. You are a poor builder, Rabboni, if you would use such shifting sand as your foundation.

the kindling

for anon, who requested--humans have lights in their skin (kind of like fireflies) and they look a bit like the stars in the night sky

They call it the Kindling, when the faint sheen of prepubescence catches alight, and burns with all the brightness of adulthood. Girls of thirteen stand around bathroom mirrors, examining their faces for bright spots, looking for stray molecular clouds in their nail beds. At seventeen, the boys' voices crack, and their skin flickers on/off like broken neon signs. All of them are in love with the astrophysics teacher, whose stellar wind sends flickers of light across the lab tables.

Late at night, they lie in bed tracing the spiral arms of their evolving galaxies, and dream dry dreams of neutron star collisions hotter than blue hypergiants.

You are in love, they say, when you find the person whose constellations fit with yours.

.

It's said that you are what happens when stars dream of people and get it wrong--too much phosphorus and not enough fear of death, pulsar instead of pulse. They left out uncertainty, not knowing what it was; the softer shades of melancholy and the gentler warmths. But they get the shape right, the brighthot of love. They get that right too.

Stars dream in metaphors of flesh, and give their dreaming taste buds for sulfur, fingers at the ends of spiral arms. You will drink liquid helium from a cracked Dewar flask, watching the brightness of your skin redouble--relearn arithmetic in parallax, counting parsecs between the Cygnus on your lover's hip and the Cetus over their breastbone. When you first feel your child's protoplanetary disc differentiate, you will cry steam tears. This is how stars dream themselves into human skin.

And this is how stars die--by eating away at themselves until only the shell is left, or scoring the darkness with their final breath, a blast bright enough to outshine a galaxy.

(...they get that right too.)

Lalochezia

Lalochezia—the use of abusive language to relieve stress or ease pain.

Later, Zinat will realize it was the flash of the the thimble at her finger. She does not wear rings much any longer, since Boromir told her of the Dark Lord’s, and how it had rotted his will and diseased his mind. How the darkness of it lingered, and how nightmares of it wracked him, and—well. Zinat does not much wear rings any longer.

A thimble is not a ring, but the way it caught the light as she embroidered must have been enough. Zinat should have guessed, as Boromir grows more and more tense, silent as he pores over maps and missives.

When she comments a little while after that her lord husband looks tired, he jerks to his feet and turns on her.

"How many times must I tell you—I am perfectly well, I do not require mothering as though I were some sort of invalid! I was the Captain of Gondor, I led armies, I protected my people, I will not be spoken to like some Eru-damned child by a woman who has never seen war!”

There is violence written in the line of his body and Zinat—for the first time, she is afraid of her husband. He is out of breath, both pale and red, and looks as though he’s about to pass out. But that is not Zinat’s concern.

"Leave," she says, trying to keep her posture regal and her voice from shaking. "Leave now.”

fake novel meme

ON THE HEAD OF A PIN

Sister Althea Parker is your average caseworker--assessing individual need, facilitating celestial placement, and providing both guardian angel and the blessed assistance through the transition period. (Her office is full of bright, cheery brochures with titles like "Body Language for the Newly Corporeal" and "Being Named A Prophet of the Lord: What Can I Expect?")

Yet when one of her clients is discovered stuffed in a dumpster, his wings torn off and blessed protectee missing, Sister Althea is not content to simply turn the matter over to the Principalities. Instead, she finds herself traveling deep into the seedy underbelly of celestial hierarchy, determined to discover the truth about her client, and find the missing saint.

Along the way, she finds a grudging ally in the unaffiliated Ramiel, an angel whose casual blasphemy and rumored Nephilim past make her dangerous company. (Her habit of blood-red lipstick and flirting with Ophanim doesn't help.) Yet together, they are intent on uncovering the ugly truth--even if it damns them.

the things we give our children

Zinat’s monthly blood is a full week late when she begins retching up her breakfast each morning. One of her maids, Fenniel, holds back her braid and her veil, her hand making circles on Zinat’s back as she murmuring comforting nothings in Sindarin.

Tell no one, she instructs her maids, after washing out her mouth with the sweet wine they have brought her. She trusts those she has in her service—they speak in a pidgin of Sindarin and Haradi and Common Speak, have barred her door against Boromir in his rages, serve as her loyal eyes and ears in Emyn Arnen. If they swear to silence, then none of them will speak a word of this until Zinat tells them such.

She does not tell Boromir.

Instead—Amma, she writes to her mother, her heart pounding in her chest like the wings of a frightened bird. Her Haradi script has gone thin and inelegant with disuse and a shaking hand. Amma, what do I do? Amma, I am so frightened, I am not prepared for a child. Amma, I wish you were here.

Her mother sends a missive so adorned with seals and crests and ribbons that Zinat expects something more than, I am coming. Ready your house to receive myself and my retinue.

Zinat is so shocked—she cannot recall her mother ever leaving Umbar, let alone Harad—that it must show on her face, for Boromir asks her if it is bad news.

My mother is coming, Zinat says faintly.

But surely, that is the best news of all, Boromir answers, smiling. You have not seen her since your parting in Harad, it will be good for you to embrace her again. Eowyn and Faramir are away in Rohan, so there will be room enough for all their party, and I will be glad to welcome her as my own mother.

He says it like it is such a small thing, clasping her hand warmly before turning back to his plate. Zinat watches him for a long moment, searching for the right words. Boromir, she says, desperately, her heart fluttering like bird’s wings again. Husband, I—I am with child.

He chokes.

creatures of a strange country

She is entirely charmed by hobbits. Harad’s library has volumes on elves and dwarves, their history and nature and lore, but hobbits are entirely new to her. (When Boromir tells her the Ringbearer was a halfling, she has to ask him what that is, if it is some tribe she has not heard of before, or perhaps some common word she is not familiar with?

He laughs, and she refuses to speak to him until he kisses her.)

One winter, Peregrin Took and Meriadoc Brandybuck come to stay at Emyn Arnen, and they are as strange and delightful to Zinat as she is to them. She tells them stories of mumakils—they call them oliphaunts, and seem to think they are monsters, which makes her laugh and tell them about the gentle giant entrusted with carrying the royal ladies when they travel. In return, they tell her about the Shire—it sounds impossibly green and peaceful, like living in a garden.

On Elves

it's weird to think of Tolkien's elves doing anything really crushingly mundane

like, there have to be elves who do Rivendell's laundry right? While Arwen and Elrond and Elladan and Elrohir are all swanning around in all their lovely silks and velvets, there's got to be some elf woman bent over a giant steaming vat, a cake of lye in one hand, cursing in Sindarin at wine stains. And she's immortal, she's been doing this for centuries, her palms are cracked from scalding water and she'll never die, she'll never age, she'll always be fair and six foot three as she hangs sheets up to dry.

and someone's doing dishes in Mirkwood, mucking out stalls in Lothlorien--even if you build a race that's all singing and air and light and beauty, someone still has to scrub the garderobe afterwards.

do Tolkien's elves even sweat? do their muscles ache at anything short of three-day battles with the incarnations of darkness? are there elves who get told to shut up about their sadiron designs and write some more poetry about stars?

...does that washerwoman in Rivendell hear the Lay of Leithian and wonder whose job it was, after the dust had cleared, to clean the dress Luthien had woven from her hair?

gandalf and galadriel

gandalf is maiar, he is olorin from before the beginning of the world, this terrible bright untouchable thing that chose to stoop, to bend, not to just take up a necessary duty, but also to be gandalf the grey--to smoke pipeweed and make fireworks for hobbits, people of little consequence, yes, but they make stalwart heroes, as he delights in showing her.

and she is artanis, heir to the line of noldor, teleri, and vanyar, mistress of lothlorien, the dream-wood, with the light of the two lamps in her hair and a mind that saw into the hearts of men, but judged mercifully. She remembers valinor, and belerialand, and all the tongues of her people that have passed from memory--but he remembers too, and they are of a kind, keepers of a memory that has passed out of all but dreams and

she is so gentle with him, she walks, bare-footed through the dark fortress of dol goldur to find him, she pushes his hair from his face and cradles him in her lap, this being of brightness from before the world was made--and he says my lady come with me because he can see how very small she is, despite her height, how greatly unmatched against another thing like him. Will she not come away--

(she is a light in the darkness, and he will not let her go out)

but she is self-willed, like finwe before her, and so she stays, and fights, and banishes their enemy to the east, though it would take all her strength.

still he is glad--glad beyond measure--when he comes to lothlorien again, and she is there. And she laughs like a girl (to him, she always will be) and lays her head in his lap, and they speak in long-dead languages--of hobbits, and fireworks, and her shining hair smells of pipeweed for a good while after.

tolkien and accents

I was thinking about Tolkien and accents today, and I really like this idea that even within the Fellowship, you've got this happy cacophony of different accents. Boromir speaking Sindarin with a distinctly Gondorian lilt, his Westron a functional thing cobbled-together from the slang of his men and what he learned in order to speak with traders, messengers, foreigners.

Aragorn, so widely-traveled, being an excellent mimic--he can speak Dalish like a man of Laketown or a Haradrim like trader from South Gondor, but in moments of sincerity or seriousness, he slips into the tones of Rivendell, with all the careful articulation of someone who was scoffed at for every slip into the harsher pronunciation of Arnor.

Legolas who speaks Sindarin as his mother-tongue cool and green and fine, but whose Westron is harshly-accented, borrowed from fishermen and dwarves.

Gimli who speaks Khuzdul with that particular Longbeard cadence, which not even growing up in the Iron Hills as part of the Erebor diaspora could shake from him. Exile from Erebor forced many of the dwarves to become, if not fluent, then at least conversant in the languages of Men, in order to trade and travel on soil not their own--Gimli is no exception. (It amuses him to no end to speak to Aragorn in Dalish, and have Legolas puff up, offended not to be part of the conversation.)

Merry and Frodo and Pippin and Sam speaking Westron like the country bumpkins they are, all rounded vowels and drawls, but happy to learn all the languages that fly about them, laughing with their fellows when they mangle even the simplest of Sindarin words.

All of them sitting around the fire, telling stories, laughing at Gandalf when he can't remember the Westron word for the Sindarin word for the Quendian word for the Valarin, who protests that he is an old man and has known too many tongues, so stop laughing, Peregrin Took, you are spraying crumbs everywhere.

starlight and earth

I think a lot about that scene at the lakeside, when kili says you make me feel alive and amralime, and tauriel gasps, tauriel scrabbles for space, for distance, for some semblance of objectivity, because—someone must, someone must be sensible, she must be sensible—love does not warp the world around it it is an accident of the heart in a world of knives, and she would not see him bloodied to ribbons in her name; she is water, she shapes herself to the stones she flows around, elven-kings and woodland princes and her own exile, only—

only he gives her shape, a promise-stone meant for his mother, he sees her, as she is, calm and clear-eyed and true, and teases her irreverently despite her seriousness, he pins her down, makes her stay, makes her real, and when he says I am not afraid it is because he is not, because she does not give an inch and so he will not either, will not apologize.

tolkien daemons

Bilbo has a pika, and the dwarves tease him relentlessly about her, the fat little burrower, with her sleek coat. But pikas are small and quiet and quick (our thief, they call him, though the tone of it grows fonder, with each saying) and pikas are aggressively defensive of their territory, so it does not surprise him too much when she is there on Bilbo’s shoulder as he draws his sword.

Thorin has a mouflon with broad, curving horns. Once, she wore them decked in gold leaf and metalwork, intricate carvings and inlaid gems to show Thorin’s skill, his birthright. But those were sold, one bad winter when he could not find work—she wears them bare now, proud of the deep scoring left behind by orc blades.

Dwalin’s urial will lay down with her sometimes, when the dwarves are in deep conversation

some thoughts on orcs

Well, after generations of being cannon-fodder for whatever dark power blew through Middle Earth, I think theirs would be a highly militaristic society, valuing survival above all else. (You can read the division between the Uruk-hai and the snaga as Spartan citizens vs. helots, which is a parallel I like.)

Worship of Morgoth (who is father to orcs as Aule is father to dwarves) generally varies with proximity to Mordor—Mordor orcs tend to be fervent, almost religious crusaders, encouraged as they are by Sauron. (Since Sauron, as disciple of Morgoth, can paint himself as the natural successor and leader of the orcs.) But in most of the orcish kingdoms outside of Mordor it’s a matter of knowing which of your grandsires fought for Morgoth, and leaving a cutting of your meat in the place you ate it, as an offering.

(flesh for flesh, repaying a debt—plus as subsistence farmers, scavengers, and cave dwellers, offering something as rich and strength-giving as meat is true a sacrifice.)

(Contrary to what other races think, they do actually have social taboos against cannibalism, though it’s more frowned on than actually forbidden or unthinkable. They haven’t ever really known plenty, they’re not going to turn their noses up at something edible in times of crisis.)

(…I also have some thoughts about how the orcs could live in Moria with a Balrog a couple floors down, and the weirdo fringe-cult that would give birth to, but that’s for another time.)

the holly and the guldaudi

Winter came coldly to Ithilien, leaving Emyn Arnen buried in deep snow, and the Anduin treacherous with floes of ice that kept even the more experienced boatmen huddled on their separate shores. All of Gondor seemed to shudder and lay still, no one willing to brave the bitter grey sky for any distance greater than the fire to their furs.

"It was a good year," Zinat told Boromir, when he asked about their stores. "As long as the roads thaw by the end of Nénimë, we should have enough to feed ourselves and the household. It might even stretch to Súlìmë, if we are careful, and learn to like the taste of salted fish and lembas."

Boromir clasped her hand, pronouncing her the best and cleverest of wives; Faramir, who had come from Minas Tirith just ahead of the storm, commended her for her foresight. But even as the conversation shifted to wood supplies and feed stores, Zinat could not help noticing how Eowyn stood, pale and silent at the window—her look distant, and colder than the ice on the pane.

(Had she been one of Zinat’s sisters, a woman of the zenana, Zinat would have gone to her, laid a hand on her crossed arms and asked what grieved her heart so. But it was not Zinat’s place to ask Eowyn, daughter of Rohan, what could steal the joy from her so suddenly—so she said nothing, and left the Rohirric princess to the company of her own thoughts.)

zophiel

zophiel does not believe the war will end.

she has no frame of reference for it, can’t remember a heaven not scored by shelling and smelling of the pyre. “before the war” is nothing but a story her brothers tell each other with their bellies deep in mud, a sweet lie to warm their wings—this thing that began must have an ending, we need only live to see it.

(her wings smelled of iron before she knew what they were for; the harps were long ago unstrung, sword-calloused hands not knowing how to hold them. there is no before, not for her, and not after)

heaven is battlelines and mud, and hell is fire; all else is vacuum, and darkness, but zophiel survives, and she is glad, glad, glad.

For centuries after the Fall, Gabriel believes that Lucifer—Lucifer will come back. He could. He might. One day he will simply walk back through the gates, laughter on his lips, as though nothing has transpired. The Father will forgive him—the Father always forgives, and Lucifer was loved so well. It is only a matter of time.

(It isn’t until the first of their brothers falls to Lucifer’s war, until Gabriel sees the bloody feathers, the ribcage opened up and the organs spilling out like magician’s scarves, that Gabriel realizes there can be no homecoming for their prodigal brother.)

Raphael is more realistic. Raphael only believes that Lucifer will return for a few decades, a quiet hope that mostly takes the form of letters written and left unsent, letters that say come home the flowers are in bloom ramiel is learning to fly michael is miserable and taking it out on the fledglings he misses you gabriel keeps asking when you’re coming back I miss you I miss you come back come back.

(Then, Azazel falls. His is not a flood of quintessence and fury—Azazel is only a cherubim, not the Morningstar—but a quieter leaving, a sudden absence and a hastily scrawled note: He promised me more than Heaven. Then, Raphael knows. All that is good in Heaven could not bring Lucifer back to them.)

Michael never believed. From the moment Lucifer laughed that cold, mirthless laugh, from the moment he refused to kneel—Michael knew.

(Michael still never got to say goodbye.)

raphael and uriel

Oh, raphael is there, but raphael is god-who-heals, gentlest of the cardinal four, and the war appalls him—michael had to beg him to captain the field hospital, had to go to him on his knees, and michael does not beg. It is a sign of how badly the war is going that he dared approach raphael at all.

but raphael is skilled in healing, second only to the father himself in the laying of hands, and so raphael does his duty, washes the blood from his brothers’ bodies and amputates broken wings and prays over the dying and slowly a cavern opens up inside him, filled with blood and things that cannot be mended.

(he flinches at the sound of distant shelling now, growing thin beneath his robes, dull-eyed and desperate to be anything but this—

so he runs to earth, runs to gabriel, who lets him mope around for a century or two before saying, if you’re staying, at least make yourself useful—there’s a kid called tobiah who needs help catching a fish.)

(humanity is a species made of porcelain and spun sugar, surviving on scar tissue and stubbornness. raphael loves them for it, learns again how to heal.)

heaven

so I know I've been talking about Heaven as like, trenches and astronomical bodies and physical space, but that's just because I haven't figured out a good way to write about a heaven so removed from humanity's experience of the world that language fails.

because my favorite thing is a heaven that isn't a physical space, isn't a thing the way the world is a thing, populated with beings that are also not things, so nothing occupies space and nothing occupies time they're just math and vacuum except not because those are things and you see why I'm having problems with this.

but then you get this great idea of humanity showing up for that eternal life they were promised, and humanity is just so fucking used to three-dimensional space and experiences of time that they warp the non-universe around them and it's all a great experiment in subjective idealism

because an angel isn't a thing but when humanity is faced with an angel, it expects a thing and so angels are suddenly things and heaven is suddenly a place, and it's all very confusing if you're accustomed to existing simultaneously in twenty-six dimensions and none at all.

(humanity gives heaven weather.)

(weather. in heaven.)

(why???)

so humanity goes around retooling heaven in their image of earth's image, making things from not-things and calling it good, leaving the angels to scramble helplessly after them. (heaven was operating off newtonian mechanics for centuries, it was a nightmare. every time the angels wanted to go faster than the speed of light they had to deliberately avoid thinking about maxwell's equations or end up slamming into a paradox.)

and anytime an angel tries to complain, god laughs.

fucking creators, man.

Gabriel (Come the War)

when gabriel receives his first orders, he storms into michael's makeshift headquarters. (it's carved from a large quasar group, held up with old bits of armor, a broken spear or two, chewing gum and hope.)

earth? gabriel snarls, thrusting the dispatch in michael's direction. you're sending me to earth? are you trying to insult me, I'm a prince of heaven and you're sending me so far rearward that I might as well let my sword rust! I won't see any battle, michael!

earth needs defending as much as heaven, brother, michael replies gently, but gabriel will not be turned aside.

tolkien marginalia

arwen, at the dawning of the third age

When she is no longer a child, yet not quite anything more, Mithrandir bends down and cups her face in his thin hands. He peers deeply into her eyes, and then he smiles. 'There is more than just the likeness of Lúthien about you,' he tells her gently. 'You would have her wildness, and fire, and bitterness too.'

She keeps that under her tongue for long years, waiting to give it voice. 

Her brothers wander afar with the Dúnedain sons fostered in Imladris; she is permitted only to read the letters that come later, proclaiming the death of yet another son of Númenor. Her naneth teaches her the politesse of a lady and mistress, as well as all the private efforts which feed the illusions ease and hospitality. But when her ada welcomes princes and warriors to his chambers for counsel, she is left alone, on the cold side of the doors.

So she waits, as Lúthien did in Doriath.

remember when we used to shine
and had no fear or sense of time

Raphael was made for the mending of broken things.

He rekindles Gabriel’s Grace when his little brother dances too close to event horizons, the hungry darkness swallowing the youngest archangel’s laughter and licking at the edges of his light. Lucifer and Michael fight often and cruelly, but Raphael’s hands can smooth their crooked pinions and ruffled secondaries, even if he cannot salve their rage. The fledglings wrestle amid the galaxies, and then they come to him, that he might wipe the ash of supernovae from their cheeks, and wrap their scorched hands (now you know not to touch the stellar nucleosynthesis) in cool healing.

For Raphael was made for the mending broken things.

Then Lucifer rebels, and is cast from Heaven in a flood quintessence and fury. Then Gabriel vanishes into the space between stars, leaving no path for any to follow after. Then Father withdraws further into the Garden, until none may have audience with him but the Metatron.

And Michael (weary-eyed Michael in battered armor, Michael who was ordered by his Father to cast out his brother and did as he was charged, for he is the good son, even with a broken, brotherless heart) looks to Raphael.

Brother, Michael says.

And Raphael is not the brother Michael’s Grace longs for, nor the brother whose laughter could drive the sorrow from Michael’s eyes. But Raphael kisses him and Raphael says Yes, for Raphael was made to mend broken things.

When Michael takes up the governance of Heaven, Raphael is at his side.

(Without the other points of the compass rose, Raphael and Michael are a needle spinning, frenzied, searching for a north that cannot be found. But they try. They do not know what else to do but try.

Father retreats further into the Garden.)

I have been staring at this ask for a week now, anon, trying to figure out if I actually had an answer that wasn’t a keysmash and a gif of an explosion.

For all the time I spend trying to articulate the ineffable about my faith, Jesus is the one topic I’m wary of. My idea of him is so wrapped up in what I am and what I love and what I long to become, that it makes it difficult to speak on the subject without actually inviting you inside my head. But I’ve never actually tried to articulate any my feelings, so maybe it’s about time I did.

a curse

burn ibis feathers
the tongues of starlings
wash down with soured vinegar,
wet ashes.
help me to salt the earth,
[side by side beneath a bruising sky,
we will spill salt, sow sorrow—
touch my rimed hands,
say, you have swallowed the sea]
dig this grave with me, again and again,
until i am satisfied. then
shoot me.
fill the grave we dug together
with my body, the
broken wings of larks.

wander on alone, hands full of salt.

a charm

i wear your heartstrings in a lover’s knot
around my wrist—pulse point to pulse,
flesh and its answer.
[this is wrecked devotion, the savage face
of desire. venus smiles, sphinx-like,
hiding the blood in her teeth
the philter in her palm. nike hails her.]
i tore up the slope of your spine, planted green willow.

your heartstrings bleed.

urban angels

there’s a seraph who sleeps in the pews of the city’s churches because it’s the only place she feels comfortable stretching out her wings, feathers nearly blocking out the stained glass windows. At night, the prayers embedded in the stonework whisper to her, a litany of please and help and need, as inexorable and unceasing as the rattle of the subway beneath her.
and there’s an angel of the third sphere who plays pickup basketball with a young prophet—a young man who walks through metal detectors each morning to get to a high school where only fifty percent will graduate, but loves calculus and singing in church every Sunday. “Your jump shot’s insane, man,” the saint-to-be laughs, clapping the angel on the back, right between the wings. And the angel, who can see how the light catches on the young man’s halo, laughs too.
and there are ophanim sitting on the girders of half-built skyscrapers, unafraid of falling; passing sandwiches and thermoses of campbell’s soup between them, speaking in tongues about the traffic on I-90 and last night’s Bears game.
and Israfel sneaks away from celestial choir practice to attend concerts in the park, but he usually ends up absently sketching equations modeling the wavelengths into the grass. There’s an adjunct mathematics professor who sometimes attends, and afterwards they discuss hyperharmonic series in the gathering dusk.
angels in the public libraries, reading children’s books and touching the illustrations with just their fingertips, like beholding a sacred text.
angels moving along the cracks in the pavement and between the alleyways; going without fear into the worst neighborhoods, because they have walked in the valley of death and fear no evil—not even the mastery of it that humanity demonstrates through abject poverty, ignorance, social immobility.
angels glaring at potholes  and rolling their eyes at delays (the work of the Deceiver, no doubt) and running to catch a subway that goes not even a hairsbreadth of the speed their wings could carry them.
angels looking up at the statues made in their image, grey forms on grey pedestals with granite wings, and snickering to themselves. (The artist missed a few hundred eyes, they think; mouths and limbs and grace and song and fire and flight—)
but then they gaze up at the brutalist skyscrapers with windows reflecting the flame-colored sunset and low-hanging exhaust, spindly radio towers forming a winking blue halo if you crane your neck just so. And the angels think maybe the humans caught a glimpse of the divine after all.

spark-spattered wheels of god

Ophanim
(Hebrew, אוֹפַנִּים ’ōfannīm)

This was the appearance and structure of the wheels: They sparkled like beryl, and all four looked alike. Each appeared to be made like a wheel intersecting a wheel.Their rings were so high that they were dreadful, and all four rings were full of eyes all around. (Ezekial 1:15-18)

i. there are angels in the subway.
(and on the bus; and the interlocking highways, beat down beneath endless tire treads; and on the bikes darting through intersections like silverfish through shoals; and growling in time with the engine, their wings tucked away behind the staring-bright headlights of cabs; and racing alongside, their bare feet on blacktop, spinning, skimming, urging homeward, homeward)
but mostly, there are angels in the subway.
ii. ophanim cannot keep still--they are not grigori, they are not made to merely watch. the angel called raziel finds herself breaking the minor rules of physics behind the wheel of an ambulance; writes friction off as unnecessary when a child's pulse is fluttering. the angel jophiel has no patience for such metal casing, prefers the marriage of physics and humanity that is a messenger bicycle; the art of keeping your balance by moving forward.
sometimes, when the road is slick with rain and streetlights are burning white and hazy, it is almost like flying.
iii. (there is a moment before the subway train appears, when the earth shudders under approaching thunder, and the stale air of the station rouses, churns, whipping itself against the walls, and indeed the very world heralds the coming of the prime mover.)
iv. once a month they gather on the girders of a half-built skyscraper--there is always one, the city does not keep still any more than they do. they speak in tongues about the traffic on I-90, exchange recipes, stretch out their wings after long days of hiding feathers beneath false skins. they are always shifting, sparking; a hundred thousand eyes and all saccadic.
the next day, the girders are scored with tire tracks no workman can explain and raziel and jophiel run, laughing, to the subway, leaving skid marks where their feet don't touch the ground.
v. in chicago, the subway is called the El.
(angels do not believe in coincidence.)

leviathan

God made them with their mouths open,
no milk teeth; loosed them on the teeming world
and said Do not eat to the wrong children,
the one whose bones snapped like dry grass,
whose blood tasted of the sea. So they ate
of the flesh, drank the blood, and had eternal life.
And when they turned back to their Father and smiled,
with all those teeth he gave
to fill their open mouths—

God cursed them for being hungry.

to the god-queen

My black-eyed fire, the knives in the kitchen
are singing for blood, her brother whispers, his mouth hot
against her godhead. They are champagne-slicked,
drunk on adulation; his skin tastes of bloodiron
and he calls her by the secret names stars sing
to their sisters. She lets her head fall back, inverts the world.
(what else is a crown for?)
Above, her city flames, an electric asterism falling
into the dark-dappled sky. Ad astra per urbem, the one
truth she shares with the rat-messiah whose followers burn
her effigy, tongues forked and still bloody from the scalpel.
This is how the false god dies, he tells them, in flesh and fire.
He is not wrong. But she is a fixed star, and her throne
will not be upended with Cassiopeia's--
hers are the spires of cathedrals, the cool marble pillars,
the cold blaze of immortality that goes forth
before all of astral blood--
burning, burning, burning.

advice for girls in labyrinths

this is the part of the story no one mentions—
you’ll have trouble telling them apart

that sometimes theseus wears horns,
and dionysus laughs with an athenian mouth;
even swaddled in the valleys of naxos 
you’ll dream of being back in the minotaur’s arms,
the musk of him, the way you were his world
entire. how’s a girl supposed to choose,
when the man asking is fair as a god,
and monstrous?

who rescues who?
who’s supposed to do the leaving?

(you. it’s always you.
check none of the above and stitch your clothes
with that golden thread—
make every path lead back to you.

…I’m sorry, whose story did you think this was?)

Chrysopoetics

I. the world ends softly—
systole, then
the sudden absence of answer.

II. the sky burns in pieces—Beijing first,
then Bangkok. The news is full
of men and women in surgical masks,
suitcoats rimed ash-white.
Children are being kept inside, it informs,
but you catch round faces at the edge
of camera frames, small noses pressed
against windows.

(how to explain Armageddon
to those little grigori, wide-eyed and guiltless?)

your town gets hit between Nashville
and Kansas City, a few chill-sharp hours
before dawn. you stand in the gathering white,
death dusting your eyelashes.

it’s getting harder to breathe.

The headaches are getting worse. At night she dreams of old seas, older than time, out of time. She dreams of teeth, and waves.

.

She’s always had a few stretch marks at her thighs, under her arms. They’re old and faint, spiderweb white from a time when she was growing too quickly for her body to keep up. She likes them—they’re the only scars she bears from something other than violence.

But they’re old, familiar, so it takes her a while to notice how much they’ve widened, deepened, her skin sliced to her knees, up her shoulders. The color is wrong too—the mottled yellow of a bruise, of things broken, and infected. She keeps an eye on them after that, watches as they darken to purple and then black, like ink and sin.

She thinks of saying something to Nick, but doesn’t know what she’d say.

They crack open during a hunt, oozing thick, tarry blood that stains all the way to her jacket. She doesn’t notice until afterwards, when she races through a shower (she drew the short straw, no hot water for the last in line) and then finds herself staring at open wounds.

It looks like something was trying to claw her way out from under her skin.

on the subject of long distance

the flesh of you is inconvenient—
not beneath my fingers, or my mouth;
too far for even fingertips to reach,
straining. you are a theoretical exercise,
galatea without even stone, and yet—

you are beautiful and live in a house,
far away. I stand at my kitchen sink,
thinking of that place, yet uncharted,
where I would press my lips. you call
my name.
as though the ghost of me
needed reminding.

330 BC

it was so simple then—the universe moved in perfect circles,
and we were the fixed point of divine isometries. how aristotle’s voice
must have trembled when he explained
that bodies reached for one another because
we are all earth, tending toward ourselves.
(and we have never truly forgotten,
recovered)

stars & blood & earth

I cannot take back the way your lip split
against my incisor, the taste
of unearthed copper. I was greedy,
I know. I wanted the parts of you
that were once
among the most luminous stars
the way this was once a love poem.

they made people different in the dark ages--pale as martyrs, long-fingered hands folded in prayer or turned up, stigmatic blood collecting in their palms. Their necks are always craning, bodies unnaturally posed, as though looking up or bending down were not humanity's natural states.

--a different species, wearing colors brighter than we know--richer blues, headier greens. The medieval mind was a thing of interlaced vines and celtic knots, holy days writ in red--the world was a circle unraveling, the liturgical calender turning and turning until it would be anno domini iterum, in saecula saeculorum. amen.

everything was germanic forest and blank spaces on the map, miracles and monsters embedded in the skein of the world. (how else is god to show his power?) all is ordered, and aristotle's spheres are fixed tending towards the center--the earth, the heart.

there are angels with illuminated wings at the edges of the manuscript, their heads bent together, whispering about dragons and the Kingdom on the next page.

ones who have fallen

Later, you will say you met down by the river, that he offered to help water the sheep—oh yes, Rachel was not the first to offer that particular excuse, when a father asked why a young man with a hard mouth was before him, daring.

The truth is something closer to this—there was a man in the shade of a tree, eating a handful of dates and watching you swim. That when you emerged, he tilted his head back so he might meet your gaze, instead of his eyes lingering on your breasts, the swing of your hips.

I am called Tamiel, he says when you ask. I am a messenger of the One True God. Be not afraid.

You are not (though you thought him just a man, then) so you do not feel strange in asking, Do you have a message for me?

No, says. His face is guileless. I just like it here.

Very well, you answer, sitting beside him in the shade. After a moment, you steal one of his dates from his palm, and watch him smile.

mary magdalene, at the tomb

I.

The young man in the tomb looks the way he must have, you think--slender and olive-limbed, too old around the eyes but with a mouth shaped for smiling. Yeshua's brother, without divinity to come and suck the marrow from his bones, to break him against humanity's ungratefulness.

He is risen, the young man says, though you can barely hear him over Salome's cries of astonishment, Mary mother of James' fingers digging into your arm. But the young man's mouth is unbroken, and his eyes linger on your face. He is not here, he is risen, his is risen.

You stumble into the morninglight trembling, To what? on your tongue like a burning coal.

II.

In Matthew, they've recast the role, an angel whose countenance is lightning and says fear not as though it is enough stop other Miriam from screaming. But you are twenty--or fifteen, twenty-five, thirty, older, old enough to know what it is to keep demons in your skin, to watch your god's wrists strung up by a windlass, and you did not come for angels. Where is he? you demand.

He goeth before you to galilee, the angel says, but you are already running, you are gone to seek the one they call God.

the perils of loving a snow queen

You will kiss other women
honeyed-mouthed women, with
pulses like summer thunder and skin
warm as fields lying fallow. But apple-sweet
love fades, and

they will call you cold. You laugh,
already thinking of the first frost, that shard
of mirror she placed on your tongue
(it is lodged somewhere in your throat,
every breath mercuric, poisoned)

the first cold snap finds you barefoot
at the edge of forest. Waiting.

to look upon angels

any manifestation of divinity in stories needs to be monstrous and alien and beyond the scope of the text to contain. So let's talk about how they are creatures of spirit, divine starlight that fits into the space between atoms and swallows worlds and both at once; how everything is here and everything is now and both are the terrible might of the Lord, because no angel can be an atheist, not even the Morningstar, for all the universe, every quark, vibrates to greatness of God and so do they, servants that they are.

(they have their father's wrath and their father's might, all right angles and the fury of a storm. They do not feel any more than a solar storm feels, and think in syllogisms and straight lines and swords)

past the world's ending

She tries. Elizabeth Turner, nee Swan, tries. Finds a little house to rent, takes in laundry because her hands are already rough, and the smell of lye reminds her of that tall governor’s house, where clothes came white and the silver gleamed. Sometimes she imagines what her father would say, if he could see how far his pirate king laundress of a daughter had fallen, and laughs.

The townsfolk say she spends too much time walking the shore, too much time staring out at the sea. Even for a sailor’s wife, they say.

Yes, Elizabeth Turner agrees. But she is trying.

When she pieces together that she’s pregnant, she stops trying. She goes down to that cove where she kissed Will goodbye and fills a small jar with sand and dirt. She uses the sharp edge of a cockle to cut her finger open, the left one where her wedding ring goes, and bleeds herself from the heart. She seals her jar with wax, kisses the lip. Makes herself a promise.

The next day, Elizabeth Turner is on a ship, where no one questions the urge to stare at the horizon. A week after that, Elizabeth Turner leads a mutiny and readjusts their course, due Shipwreck Island. (Well—with detours. Elizabeth has always wanted to see the Spanish Armada.)

(…on their knees.)

Brontide

Brontide—the low rumbling of distant thunder.

One of your earliest memories is the children of the village pelting you with stones, and having to remember to bleed.

.

(In your mother’s stories, you father is a creature of flame and wings, strangeness and magnificence. In all the rest of your life, he is only an absence, sighted slantwise in your reflection on the surface of the river.

You have his eyes, your mother tells you. You wish they looked more like hers; then maybe the villagers would not desire to tear them from your face.)

.

Sometimes strange men pass through the village, men with wine-dark eyes and cloaks that shift and billow even when there is no wind. They speak to one another in a language none other knows, and you follow them as close as you dare, looking for some resemblance to your own features in their strange faces.

Are you my father’s people? you ask once, when the latest wanderers catch you trailing behind, when you will not be turned aside by a proffered coin. I am Tamiel’s daughter—

Some Nephil’s spawn, the elder of the two sneers, regarding you as though you were one of the diseased dogs that scrounge in the marketplace. Pay it no mind, it will leave us alone.

They abandon you there in the street, with questions you are not certain any other can answer. You watch them go, their cloaks shifting without wind, and hate them.

10 things michael loves about his brothers

I. Lucifer was grown from the seed of a photon, nested in the heart of a nebula. When he was no bigger than a white dwarf, God took Michael to see him. He let Michael hold Lucifer—just by the wing-tips, for Lucifer was still only boiling dust and hydrogen gas. But he was already so bright, so hot, atoms trying to fly in a hundred directions at once. ‘Michael,’ the Father had said, ‘this is your brother. You will have many brothers after him, and you will love them all, but not as you love this one, for he was first.’

In his more uncharitable moments, Michael thinks it may have been the cruelest thing his Father has asked of him.

II. The younger angels don’t remember a time before the War. They’ve never seen the Garden as it once was—green and full, angels wandering beneath the boughs barefoot, laughing. Once, when Michael is inspecting the eastern garrison, he tells one of the footsoldiers to re-make his bed, it looks like an ox got into the tabernacle.

Sir, I don’t—what is that?

What’s what, soldier?

The tabernacle.

Michael stares. Then, he exhales shakily, lowering himself to sit on the footsoldier’s cot. Well, he says, trying to find the words. (Words were always Gabriel’s gift, and Michael hasn’t seen him since Gabriel’s company departed for earth.) Before the beginning, there was us. And then…then there was everything else.

By the time he finishes, the whole garrison sits at his feet, listening. They are very young, and Michael loves them enough for his heart to break.

III. Haniel learns how to play “You Are My Sunshine” on a harmonica he borrowed from a baptist preacher in the 20th century. The sound is sorrowful, winding through the trenches.

How does Zinat interact with Faramir?

The Haradi delegation has been in Minas Tirith only three days, but Zinat knows that the lord Faramir does not like her. The best that can be said of it is that he hides his feelings better than the lord Boromir, who wears his resentment like a surcoat. (It grates against her, more than the impending marriage itself—the  ambassadors had warned her that the prince would be resistant, but she had assumed this alliance at least worth the effort of feigning politeness.)

The lord Faramir’s dislike, however, is curious. She had counted him among Harad’s supporters in Gondor, having been so instrumental in crafting the trade agreements. And it is not as though this marriage would be inflicted on him—Faramir already had a bride, the tall woman with the pale-gold hair Zinat had met briefly during one of the great feasts. He is unfailingly cordial towards her, and discourse with him easy—and still Zinat gets the sense that he truly does not like her.

But it seems very petty to discuss the lord Faramir’s feelings towards her with the ambassadors, or with her most royal brother, and none of her ladies have any insight into the matter. So she merely smiles, and charms, and prays that she gives neither brother grounds to find fault in her.

.

Faramir doesn’t dislike the Haradi princess. Truly, he doesn’t. She is beautiful, clever, a natural diplomat; her Sindarin better than some Gondorian nobles he could name, and her dark eyes betray a quick and unflinching mind. She brings as her marriage-gift further legitimacy for Aragorn’s rule, new markets for Gondor’s goods, a powerful naval ally, and the promise of a new beginning between Middle Earth’s two powerful empires in the wake of war.

And, were she to marry anyone except his brother, Faramir would be overjoyed.

Angel's ten favorite pieces of modern technology

1793. 
Angelus’s favorite invention had been the flintlock pistol. A bit messy, perhaps, if you hit an artery directly, and yes, it wasn’t very sporting (the cat lets the mice run, Dru sing-songed, or else it spoils the soup)

…but since when were they sporting?

Just like tapping a tree, my love, he’d tell Darla, and fire.

1905.
Angel had liked gas lamps, the forgiving light of them, the shadows they cast, the lamplighters of New York, who kept the same hours and called him by name.

Electricity didn’t smell of anything.

1913.
He rode the Overland Route so many times that the rocking of it was lodged somewhere in his bones, mountains emblazoned on the back of his eyelids. At night he would climb onto the roof of the car and lay there, wind tugging at his shirt-tails, looking up at the stars.

1923.
The first time he heard a Victrola played, his soul (twenty years in and still raw, aching, ill-fitted under his skin) had burned, overwhelming and brutal as death. Angel had panicked, he had thought this some fresh twist of the curse—

It wasn’t until he saw the woman beside him smiling so beatifically that he remembered—joy.

1948.
There’s a shoebox somewhere around of the Polaroids he took—chorus girls smiling over the rim of their champagne flutes, Bugsy Siegel with his tie askew, the main street lit like daylight (though it looks dinky, hokey compared to the sprawling behemoth Las Vegas became.) There are flashy cars in the artificial light, smiles, cowboy hats and hills.

There are a few of him, mixed in there—when someone wrenched the camera from his hands, forced him to sit still. Don’t you want to be immortalized? they’d always ask, laughing, before the shutter clicked.

In those few photographs at the bottom of that shoebox, Angel looks suddenly fully of grief.

1969. 
He was two hundred and fifty, crowded around a television in the back room of some shithole bar with more than a few half-drunk demons and one mildly disapproving bartender. When, They had watched the grainy footage silently, everyone holding their breath as a man in white stepped out, onto the grey surface of another world, and said for mankind.

Damn, one of the demons breathed softly. Look at that. Nothing but fire and a tin can, and the little monkeys actually did it. They did it.

Angel was silent, thinking of those two men, millions of miles from the earth, defying the cold silence of eternity just by breathing. Just with hope.

1997.
Buffy gave him a Tamagotchi once, because—well. Buffy.

It was inexplicably still in his pocket the day he was resurrected from Hell; it was still there the day he finally said goodbye to her. But he lost it somehow, moving to Los Angeles, or it got left behind, or—

He hoped its new owner was feeding it properly.

2003.
Search engines. He might still type with his pointer fingers and get confused about which buttons do what, but the day he realized that someone had scanned most of the really important 17th century grimoires and made them keyword-searchable was the day he surrendered to the computer age.

The day he stumbles onto Cordy’s audition reel, it’s like—

He’d forgotten how bright her smile was.

+1
He really likes his rolodex, okay? So everyone can just stop with the 80s jokes.

this bird, my soul

The first time they meet, the Steward of Gondor is so stiff, so painstakingly awkwardly formal, that Zinat comes away thinking him cold and haughty—it is only decorum that keeps her smile demure and pleasant, even as the Steward stumbles through the traditional Haradi greetings like they pain him, immediately turning away to speak to his brother.

(He speaks Haradi worse than the tongueless beggars outside the palace, her handmaid says that night, while brushing out Zinat’s hair. Zinat presses her fingers to her lips, but cannot keep the laughter in—she and her maid laugh until Zinat is breathless, giddy. It is the lightest she has felt since she watched Umbar vanish over the waves.)

So Gondor makes Harad welcome and Zinat makes stilted, labored conversation with a Lord Steward who so clearly thinks her unworthy of it. They are thrust together at feasts and hunting parties, always beneath the watchful eye of Zinat’s lord brother, or King Elessar. No one so much as whispers the word marriage, but it hangs heavy in the air, a leaden yolk with the weight resting between Zinat’s shoulders.

Sometimes, she looks to the Prince of Ithilien and thinks she sees his shoulders hunched under the same weight.

(He is not…displeasing to look upon, her lady-in-waiting remarks once, as they walk through the white, white halls of the White Tower. You must admit that the lord prince has a fair and noble face.

The face of the mountain is fair and noble too, Zinat replies. She finds herself missing the red sandstone of the palace at Umbar, which was not so smooth and cold beneath her hands. It does not mean I wish to build my home on the rocks.)

Can you tell me why Frodo is so important in lotr? Why can't someone else, anyone else, carry the ring to mordor?

but someone else could.

that’s the whole point of frodo—there is nothing special about him, he’s a hobbit, he’s short and likes stories, smokes pipeweed and makes mischief, he’s a young man like other young men, except for the singularly important fact that he is the one who volunteers. there is this terrible thing that must be done, the magnitude of which no one fully understands and can never understand before it is done, but frodo says me and frodo says I will.

(when boromir is thinking of how he can use the ring to defend gondor, when aragorn is thinking of how it brought down proud isildur, when elrond is holding council and gandalf is thinking of how twisted he would become, if he ever dared—)

but then there’s frodo, who desires nothing except what he has already left behind him, and says, I will take the Ring.

it is an offer made out of absolute innocence, utter sincerity. It is made without knowing what it will make of him—and frodo loses everything to the ring, he loses peace and himself and the shire, he loses the ability to be in the world. It’s cruel, the ring is cruel, it searches out every weakness you have and feeds on it, drinks you dry and fills you with its poison instead, the ring is so cruel.

and frodo picks it up willingly. for no other reason except that it has to be done.

(the ring warps boromir into a hopeless grasping dead thing, the power of the palantir turns denethor into an old man, jealous and suspicious, it bends even saruman, once the proudest of the istari, into a mechanised warlord, sitting in his fortress and bent over his perverse creations—all the best of intentions, laid waste)

but there’s a reason gollum exists in the narrative, which is to show—well, to show what frodo might have been. because even as frodo grows mistrustful and wearied, as the burden of this ring grows heavier and heavier, he is never gollum. he is gentle to gollum. he is afraid—god frodo is so afraid for 2/3 of these books he is so tired and afraid, but he keeps moving, he walks though it would pull him into the ground, because he asked for this, he said he would.

someone else could have carried the ring to mordor, I suppose. the idea of a martyr is not dependent on the particular flesh and blood person dying for some greater purpose. but such a thing has to be chosen, lifted onto your shoulders for the right reason, the truest reasons, and followed into the dark, though it would see you burnt through and bled out.

I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.

What Uriel Remembers of the War, a List

I. How quiet everything was, after Lucifer fell.

II. The older angels had stood around in small groups, their heads bent together, whispering. All of them looked tired, and worried—though Uriel hadn’t known what to call that grey and pinched expression. Grief and fear hadn’t been invented, before.

III. Gabriel putting a sword in her hand, explaining what it was for.

IV. The first angel dead on the battlefield had winked at her once, during lauds.

V. Keeping her breathing even and deep as first Cambriel, then Sariel and Gader’el slipped from the barracks in the dead of night. She would learn of their falling the next morning, written in the exhausted lines of Gabriel’s face.

VI. (Why did you not stop them? Miriam, daughter of Jochebed, will ask when Uriel tells her this story. You might have persuaded them to stay.

No one who contemplated such betrayal would be worth stopping, Uriel answers with a shrug of her wings. Miriam calls her unfeeling, but then, Miriam has never known war. Uriel has known nothing but.)

VII. Gabriel stopped smiling at some point after the onslaught on the third sphere.

Anagapesis

Anagapesis—the feeling when one no longer loves someone they once did.

On the first day, you lose your halo somewhere between Ashland and Halstead on the orange line. The conductor lays on the breaks too suddenly and it slides off, rolls like a dinner plate down the aisle and disappears in the crush of standing passengers. A couple of them will complain later of burns on their ankles, strange marks that set skin to humming when pressed too hard.

Your head feels suddenly lighter.

You meet a woman at the shelter that night who teaches you to say “I” and asks about your family. When you say you lost them, she pats your shoulder. It’s okay, she tells you gently, they’ll be in the last place you look. Always are.

the oracle of delphi writes fortune cookies

I.
This year will bring you cottonwood leaves
fluttering like ash from listing trunks, blight licking
the edges brown. Somewhere Daphne sleeps
in heedless photosynthestate, Apollo having forgotten
where he buried her, which cage of roots cradles
the bow of her ribs. She dreams in xylem, of drinking from
the slagheap seeping below the county’s tanned hide—
rotted gods and the bones of birds, things with teeth that once
cast manticorean shadows. All those layers of Troy,
still smelling of the pyre.

Baisemain

Baisemain—a kiss on the hand.

his hands are tar-rough, black beneath the nails and salt at the knuckles; bending to kiss his palms is like diving from the rocks into deep water. you say husband, like that is something other than a shield, a weight, a ghost.

his mouth moves as he speaks of olive trees and marriage beds, but the words sound stilted in his tongue, which you imagine too rimed with salt and blood to find its way to the hearth-fire.

(the courtyard is littered with the corpses of suitors, slaughtered by his hand and your son’s—they lie at your feet now, as they should have from the start; arrogant mouths slack and ravenous eyes unseeing.

you are glad at the sacrifice, made on your altar and not to the other grey-eyed goddess whom he loves.)

wife, he says, and then winces, hearing the hollowness of it. (you never ask their names—you were the one he returned to. all else is but a boast around the feast-table.)

queen, he tries again, kneeling before you in the blood and straw. You feel the weight of it then, those twenty years from girlhood to regnant womanhood—you are suddenly conscious of the grey at your temples, the heavy weight of your breasts. Something of your grief must show on your face, for he tries again:

ithaca, he finally sighs, gathering up fistfuls of your himation as though he is afraid you will vanish from him, pressing his face to your stomach. He clings to you as a man drowning, and there is salt at his knuckles. ithaca, my ithaca.

you surface. I am here, you say. You have come.

Mamihlapinatapei

Mamihlapinatapei—the look between two three people in which each loves the others but is too afraid to make the first move.

travel light, someone told eliot once, when he was still green and whole and genuinely believed it was only bad men who ended up bleeding out and alone. travel light, they said, because everything you carry makes you heavy, everything you keep is a weight around your ankles. travel light, son, travel light.

except sometimes hardison slings an arm over eliot’s shoulders, or parker falls asleep with her head in his lap, and eliot can feel himself sinking.

.

stall, hardison says, and eliot does.

lie, parker says, and eliot lies.

run, hardison tells him, and eliot runs. jump, parker tells him, and eliot never asks how high. he’ll grow wings before then.

he waits for them to tell him, stay.

.

he keeps waiting.

The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen

also that whole tale of aragorn and arwen thing where he saw her in the woods at twenty and fell instantly in love and it's very beren and luthien? lies.

aragorn decided he was going to marry arwen when he was like, six.

and everyone thought it was just the cutest thing, baby estel with his little crush on the great immortal evenstar, and everyone would tease him about it relentlessly and he would get so mad, and pout, because how dare they doubt his word.

(arwen spent a lot of time biting back smiles and nodding very seriously when aragorn brings this up with her. no, estel, I do not know why they are laughing perhaps they have remembered a particularly funny joke.)

and then aragorn grows into this gangly teen and oh my god can you imagine being a pimply greasy teenager around fucking elves it's a wonder he has any self-image left. His voice breaks every other word and the laundresses are beginning to wonder if something is wrong with the sheets because estel keeps washing them himself and aragorn wants to die, god, arwen is never going to marry him if he stays all elbows and skinny knees and he can't even look her in the eye anymore without blushing, eye contact is probably something to look for in a husband--

(arwen, who never had to go through puberty because elves don't do anything so undignified, tries to comfort him by saying she likes his blemishes. aragorn gives her a look of such utter, miserable despair that she starts laughing.)

(this is a mistake. he spends the next three weeks nursing his wounded ego and refusing to see her.)

estel is twenty when he asks for her hand. he is lean, slender and fair as a new tree, and so arwen does not feel guilt in kissing his cheek and gently refusing. he is still green, he will weather greater storms than this--and he takes it as he should, clasping her hand and swearing to ever be her loyal friend.

they write to each other--when she is in lorien, when he wanders with the rangers of the north, fights alongside gondor, travels to distant lands. it is an inconstant tie--he is rarely afforded time enough to put pen to paper; she is reserved so as not to encourage what may not be. (she signs her letters always, your friend. She likes him too well to be cruel in this.)

the years pass. his weariness and strife creeps onto the page, and she sends him tokens to fend off the darkness--leaves from lothlorien, the ribbon from her hair, snippets of poems. it is not enough it is never enough I am sorry, she writes.

his reply is gentle: you are enough. do not stop writing.

(she carries that letter tucked inside her sleeve for a long while, like a talisman--though against what evil, she does not know.)

she is in the house of her grandmother when a familiar voice calls out to her: my lady luthien!

this is when arwen looks up, sees aragorn--broad of chest and rugged, still wearing his battered mail, with one hand balanced lazily on the pommel of his sword. All the trees of caras galadhon are gold but he is shadow and silver, kingliness resting lightly on his shoulders--

and arwen thinks, oh fuck

you've conquered twelve planets?
that's not how we see it

II. The second mistake was to look at the infinitesimal sphere, spinning around a distant sun in a forgotten galaxy, and think--there.

III. The third mistake was humanity. A fleshy, breakable bipedal species, all threading proteins and ion channels--wet things, dripping things, soaked in hormones and blood. But Souls are not unfeeling; they first took only the undesirables: the poor, the homeless, the sick. They made them new again, approaching humanity's many leaders (what quaint territorial claims govern them!) in the spirit of enlightenment.

But the Humans refused to see, baring their calcinate teeth and making noises later deciphered as laughter.

Thus ended the spirit of enlightenment. Enter the stick.

a funeral march for the passing of gods

        We are digging a grave in the Iowa sky,
somewhere between the thunderhead and the flat line of the horizon.
It is ample to lie there, among the hagiographies
already interred in that stellate churchyard, old gods like cornflowers
pressed between the pages.

(a girl in the house plays with the serpents as they shed their skins,
unwinding from the caduceus and into her hands. She craves
pomegranates, then apples, uncertain
as to which maiden she is playing)

say you're an angel

say you're an angel cast down from heaven.

(not a fallen angel, who chose to abandon their post and ally themselves with lucifer, or a corrupted human soul, which is a different animal altogether, but an angel who was called before the tribunal and found guilty. Dishonorable discharge. And maybe you wished you'd jumped, instead of being pushed, but the sentence is handed down anyway--)

...and then you're just human. Sort of. Because the thing is, they can't turn an angel into a human--you aren't water, humanity isn't wine. The best they can do is strip you of your wings and spirit and teeth and surety, and reassemble you smaller, blind, with poison in your joints. They best they can do is make you into a uncertain fleshy thing, hollow on the inside where a soul should go. Neither human nor angel and they were being merciful, you see. Better a thing than unmade.

but your body is new, fresh out of the box, and it doesn't know how to be in the world any more than you do. You find yourself vomiting up food because your stomach doesn't understand what digestion is; you wear sweaters in mid-July because your blood stubbornly refuses to go above room temperature. You have shadows like bruises beneath your eyes.

you smell wrong. When you pass, animals cower as before a storm.

Ten Things About Boromir the Bold That Never Made It Into the Red Book of Westmarch

I. His strongest memory of his mother was the smell of the sea she carried in her hair; how dark and tall she stood, looking towards a west Boromir would ever only long for in her honor.

II. Boromir did not ever doubt that he was loved. He was the first son of Gondor, swaddled in a walled citadel and rocked in Pelennor’s arms. He did not question why his father’s love was like stone, nor why his brother looked to him like he was the highest point of the ramparts. They were a city, and how else was a city to love?

III. For Boromir’s fourteenth year, the master of hounds promised him a pup of his own—One of Huan’s own line, the man swore, As befits a prince. What Boromir received, however, was the runt of that spring’s litter, a wheezing, stumbling thing that Boromir stubbornly nursed with a cheesecloth dipped in milk, then fed meat from his own plate.

Bellas, he called her, and ignored any who dared laugh.

Bellas never grew taller than Boromir’s knees, but she was strong and stubborn and loyal—for three years, Boromir went nowhere without her shadow at his heels. Bellas slept at the end of his bed; waited patiently during Boromir’s lessons; loped after his horse when he went riding.

Boromir was seventeen when Bellas was killed, her neck broken by an orc who had stumbled into their hunting party. She had put herself between her young master and the interloper, and afterwards, Boromir had carried her in his arms all the way back to Minas Tirith.

10 things Gabriel finds fascinating about humanity

I.
One day, Gabriel goes to Jacob-called-Israel, carrying a message from the Lord. Jacob is busy in the fields, but Leah is there—she smiles at him with tender eyes, and makes him welcome in the shade of Jacob’s tent. I will find you meat and drink,she says, giving her infant daughter to Gabriel’s arms easily, the gesture practiced as habit. Rest a while here. We shall send Jacob to you when he comes.

She leaves Gabriel there, child heavy in his arms.

Dinah—for that is the child’s name—has large, dark eyes, and grasps at his halo like it is a plaything. Once or twice, she pulls it over Gabriel’s ears and into her mouth, gumming at the edge and whimpering when it cuts her lips. You are a strange little thing, Gabriel tells her, touching a finger to the soft shell of her ear. She is all softness, even the dusting of dark hair across her pate.

It is nearly sundown by the time Jacob comes, and Dinah has fallen asleep against Gabriel’s chest. He returns her to Leah’s arms then, so that he and Jacob might conference with one another.

His own arms seem emptier, after.

It seems only a little while later he is walking in Shechem, when he passes a woman—no different than any other woman in the street, except that her eyes are large and dark, full of an inherited tenderness, and there is a place where her mouth tucks in, as though it were cut by the sharp, celestial edge.

Dinah, Gabriel says, faltering. He almost does not recognize her, this woman who is flint and sun and nothing of softness. It had not seemed so long by the reckoning of angels, but—he can see ruin in her wake now, grief and strength in her visage.

She stops. Do you know me? Dinah asks.

I—no. No, I do not know you, Gabriel says, for angels do not lie.

Nephilim and their abandonment issues

first. 
among your earliest memories is of sitting with a twisted rag clenched between your teeth, as your grandmother ripped newly-sprouted feathers from your shoulders, scraped down from your belly. Her hands, worn rough and unlovely, applying salve to your ravened skin.

she stroked your hair afterwards, the only part of you not aching. (you hid the unnatural paleness of your braids beneath katam dye and the mitpahat that was your mother’s, careful, so careful.) 

there, your grandmother always said, her hand warm and heavy on the crown of you head. There, now you are my daughter’s daughter.

you thought that was love, grateful enough to be anyone’s.

but you are not a ruin (remus/tonks)

The bride shows up half an hour late, with electric orange hair and singe marks on her auror robes. We don’t have to do this, Remus says quietly, touching his fingertips to the new bruise on her cheek. You know we don’t have to do this.

There is blood on her trousers from where Leach bled out (hands scrabbling at his throat, his eyes wide and white as he struggled for breath—he’d been a few years ahead of her at Hogwarts and she’d been too busy trying to defend their position to notice when he’d gone still—)

I do, she tells Remus, who has his own fresh scars, deep shadows under his eyes. I want to. I want to.

it’s only few days from the full moon, so you may kiss the bride tastes of wolfsbane potion and his stubble, rough at her lower lip.

She transfigures her wedding band into a bracelet as Remus slips a few galleons to the only magistrate willing to witness to an illegal intermarriage. But Remus’s hand is warm when they step out into the night, and for a little while, she can pretend they are not going to die.

.

the annunciation

I. there’s this girl.

there’s this girl, and she lives in a village that barely earns the name—not even five hundred souls, living off rock and scrub, but there are flocks of goats in the hills and one synagogue hewn from stone, older than she has memory.

nothing good comes from galilee, they say, but her mother is there, and her brothers, the half dozen girls she has know since they were all babes gumming at their mothers’ teats, and yoseph, whose carpentry-rough hands cradled hers when he said, I will ask your father, I will.

the sky is vast and blue over nazareth, and it is almost enough to fill her arms.

.

II. one day she comes back from the well, and there is an angel sitting at the table of her father. It has many eyes that blink languidly at her, and a circlet of fire at its temples; at her coming, it rises to its feet (a brightness that goes up, and up, having to crane its neck to fit beneath the thatched ceiling) and says, hail maryam, full of grace, the Lord is with you.

(its voice is like summer thunder, iron on iron)

be not afraid, the angel says more gently, for maryam’s breathing has gone ragged, her heart stuttering in her chest. you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall call his name yeshua.

how? she demands, though her voice breaks on the word and she feels light-headed. yoseph, she thinks. oh yoseph. I am not yet married.

er, the angel answers, and none of its eyes will meet hers. you might want to sit down for this bit.

a time when Boromir must comfort Zinat instead of the other way around

You sent your women away, Boromir said, shutting the door quietly behind him. She could see him reflected in the curve of the mirror, the careful way he held himself, the sharpness of his gaze. How like her husband, Zinat thought with equal parts fondness and exasperation, to approach as though he were preparing an assault on unfamiliar territory. She was certain if she made too-sudden a movement, he would reach for the sword currently absent from his hip.

(It would be a lie to say she did not toy with the idea, but she was too tired and grieved to do more than that.)

Indrani came to me, Boromir said. She was worried.

I was only tired, Zinat answered, reaching back to unclasp the guluband around her neck. I do not like so many hands touching me, when I am like this. It only serves to foul my temper further.

In the mirror, she could see how Boromir studied her. You are very good at that, my wife, he said. Lying and telling the truth at once. But I am getting better at discerning when you do it. Indrani told me what passed in the hall.

Zinat’s fingers fumbled at the clasp of her necklace, as she stared blindly into the mirror. She could not find the catch, she couldn’t—her chest was tight and it was difficult to breathe, to think—they had said—is that was whispered of her? is that all she would be, in this land? 

Your hands are shaking, Boromir said gently, crossing the chamber to her side. His rough fingers grazed the back of her neck as he unclasped her guluband. She let the necklace slip down to her lap, leaning into Boromir’s hands. Boromir laughed, and teased some of the strands that had come loose of her braid. It eased the ache in her chest, to feel the warmth radiating from him. Zinat…he began quietly.

My mang, she interrupted. In the mirror she could see his expression shift, the worry giving way to a furrowed brow and an expression of confusion.

Your—what?

She touched a finger to the strand of pearls that rested in the parting of her hair, and gave him an expectant look.