[nospaces]
His funeral is in the fall, and through it all, you stand hard as a stone. A testament to your strength, perhaps, bred in bone and unleashed for the world to see even at such a tender, young age. That's what your mother says to the others in the aftermath, anyway. Manipulate and redirect. It's better they think you strong than unfeeling so early in life, for even with an ending so similar, one is a “blessing” and the other a “curse”. What child, after all, feels nothing at the loss of their beloved father?[break][break]
You don't remember him. Not really. There's a silhouette of a man where you believe he must have been, a whisper of words too quiet to make out, too nondescript to pinpoint on any one person. There are always stories of how he would hold you in his arms or bounce you on his knee or curl up around you like a fortress of stone to keep out night terrors of gargantuan spiders and bullies with ten thousand arms – but they're words, not images. He's an idea to you, not a person. You cannot love the idea of someone. You cannot miss them when they're gone.[break][break]
“Dragons did this,” your mother's spindly uncle tries to console you. (What is there to console when you do not grieve?) “Your old man went down fighting. You should be proud of him.”[break][break]
Hatred infects their eyes as they speak of them, all razor-fanged, bleeding-eyed, innocent malice. Understanding, as with most things, fails you, but you nod your head because you're a “smart” girl, “good” girl, and maybe, someday, you'll take his place in the fight for “liberation”.[break][break]
(But you can't love an idea of a human. And you can't hate the idea of a monster who has never done you any harm.)[break][break][break][break]
A well-behaved child is achieved through very simple criteria. It's easy, once you understand the formula. Simply:[break][break]
Smile with mother, but never without. Thank her for her kindness, but never beg for more. (Your father brought in money through his work, his spoils of war. You don't ask for more because there is nothing to afford more; you want as every child does, but you hold your tongue still, and they wrongly think you selfless for it.)[break][break]
Work harder than all of your peers, in school, in chores, in life. Two adults, one living, one dead, brought you the greatest gift of all, and as their spawn, you must pay them back with every ounce of your effort for bringing you to life. (Perhaps it's not duty, however, but necessity. Has Mother the strength to cook your meals, wash your clothes? Maybe she did, back in those days when Father was more than the hollow space at your table, in your home. These days, you think it takes all she has to look you in the eye.)[break][break]
Speak only when spoken to. Say nothing that would wound your late father's pride, nothing that would draw unnecessary attention, nothing that does not improve on silence.[break][break]
The last of these is the most important. It must be, for it is the one you are reminded of the most. Never kiss and tell, the other children chant to each other on the playground, skin blotted purple, skirts pulled up high, hickies on necks, all imitations of the world outside the schoolyard. They're always in such a hurry to grow up – I want to be a doctor, I want to be an actor, I want to be someone – and they think they know everything about the adult world, the ins and the outs, that they'd meld right in if only they stood just five inches taller. They don't, of course. You've seen it with your own eyes: what alcohol does to a man, the primal urges of the human race. Willing or not, you've been dragged into it, and it has swallowed you whole.[break][break]
He touches you first when you are only twelve. A child – a child, tight-lipped, never wishing to be a nuisance. There is reverence in the way his hands (twice the size of your own, enough to engulf, enough to devour) glide across first the skin of your arms, then of that which he reveals, inch by inch, from beneath your prettiest Sunday dress. Untouched by age. By war. You hadn't thought twice in following him, because he was your father's best friend, strongest ally, right-hand man; what would your “old man” think if he saw the both of you now?[break][break]
“So you can cry after all.”[break][break]
Lips pressed to tear-stained cheeks. Your sobs are silent; your body is numb. You pinky promise not to tell a soul – for your mother, your poor, poor mother, how would she handle the news? – and he leaves you, broken like a discarded doll in the storage closet.[break][break][break][break]
You count the days – then the weeks – then the months – then the years.[break][break]
Maybe he'll tire of you, you think helplessly. Maybe the mental scars he leaves in his wake will bubble on your skin, and he'll see the battlefield carved across the canvas of your back and remember his world, remember his place, stop yearning for a city that does not fight tooth and nail for its survival and the pristine children it would breed. Sometimes, you speak of the atrocities, praying that reality will snap back to him just long enough for him to tear himself away. There's always something marring his body, multiplying like rabbits, each one a mark that sketches him ever closer to his grave.[break][break]
“Did it hurt?” you whisper, hoarse, fingers pressed to a healing gouge still red and raw and real.[break][break]
“Didn't feel a thing,” he deigns to reply.[break][break]
I wish you did, you want to say, scream. I wish the dragon would've split you in two.[break][break]
But you don't. The way the world views you both is decidedly very warped: you, iron-willed, unshakable, and the man who tells you he “loves” you, a brother-in-arms, a hero, a saint. In reality, you're nothing but a scared little girl – and only good men die young in the field.[break][break]
Summer nights pass to fall, and something in you changes. You've been playing a part for so long (dutiful daughter, stoic and unbothered, innocent and untouched) that the line between visage and act begins to blur. No longer is Karva the Lionheart a character you find yourself slipping into; she becomes your skin, and you wear her to bed at night just as you wake up in her, animatronic machine in faux fur of an animal in the morning. And in these same days, something else changes beneath that skin, right to your core: a sickness in the morning, a lump in your stomach, double lines on a pregnancy test you bought with shaking hands and the entirety of your allowance at a convenience store. You're only fourteen years old.[break][break]
It's better your mother doesn't know, and for once, you are grateful for her characteristic ignorance. If she'd asked, you would have had to construct a lie. Curiosity killed the cat, sullied the lion, shattered the image of a perfect little daughter who always did as she was told. The reality: two years spent in that awful, awful closet. Even if you told the truth, who would believe you now?[break][break]
You'll kill it, you think, this leech you've contracted from a man you wish would rot, before any other can dare to question or doubt – and yet you hesitate, just for a moment, and a single moment proves to be your undoing. Where would you go? Who would help you? Would it hurt? ...What would it be like to be a mother?[break][break]
(You go back to the closet – you struggle through it alone – it hurts, so much, so much, you think death has come for you before the father, and it's all just so unfair –[break][break]
(And you hold her in your arms for the first time, brush crimson-soaked blonde hair from a face contorted in sobs, and think that maybe, just maybe, it's possible to love the idea of a person after all.)[break][break]
You never tell him of his daughter, just as you never tell the others of all the things he does to you in this room that has become the setting of all your nightmares. Most certainly, he would take her from you. Worse, still, he could take her from the world in its entirety. Perhaps he would run out of use for you if he knew, mark you as damaged, throw you away. If it is to protect the little girl you keep hidden away from the rest of humanity, however, you will sit in that closet in silence and take it as you have a hundred times before. You can forget it all, forget him when you sit at her bedside. Reality slips away from you as you sing to her songs your mother had once sung to you; the only pendant the woman had ever had the money to give to you becomes the infant's birthright.[break][break]
In a perfect world, you would have been able to keep her. Cherish her. Lead her hand-in-hand into the future.[break][break]
The tears you did not cry for your father spill in a torrent, then, when you're forced to leave her behind.[break][break][break][break]
Every day, you pray to the gods. You ask them for health, for happiness. You ask them for forgiveness of wrongdoings. More than anything, however, you ask them for the death of that man. For five years, they ignore your pleas for help, just as the rest of your filth-ridden city turns its constant blind eye to the dullness in your eye, the lethargy in your step. For five years, your prayers go unheard. And in the end, it is not the gods that finally grant your wish. No, no.[break][break]
It's the dragons.[break][break]
How valiantly he fell in battle, they say, fighting until his last breath for the preservation of a city that can barely stand. When they had spoken of such similar things in your youth about your father, you hadn't been able to conjure up so much as an image. Now, you can see it so clearly: sunlight glittering on scales as starlight, holy claws ripping waste parading a saint right down his center.[break][break]
His comrades follow him, first in a trickle, then in droves. Like dominos, they fall, and perhaps it is cruel, and perhaps it is petty, but you welcome their deaths as penance for what they let happen to you and for the daughter they gave you only to steal away. Beyond that, however, you see the ruination of your city before it ever begins. Every fighter becomes prey, and with no barrier to keep the armies of the dead and the holy judgment of the manakete's kin at bay, it is only a matter of time before the city is raided in full and its occupants left, stripped of their protection and armor, to be picked and eaten live. You mean to take your mother and flee this place – but she is adamant, fixated on the idea of resting in her ever-nearing afterlife with the man you cannot remember, the man that she had loved. She will go, then, as he did. Into the maw of the only “gods” who answered your cries for help.[break][break]
It may be so that you, not the dragons, were the innocent malice all along. Stoic. Unshaken. Somewhere in the collapsing city, your parent struggles and suffocates – and you watch it crumple from the distance without so much as a quiver of the lips.[break][break][break][break]
Nadir is bigger than your old home: in height, in girth, in population. Its streets are suffocating in their density, with crowds that threaten to trample, beggars that remain perpetually starved, disease that infects only the poor, not the rich. Many others like you have forced your way into its walls with the promise of a safe haven, but even a sanctuary can only serve so many before its walls threaten to split at the seam.[break][break]
“Dragons did this,” you hear from nearly every mouth in a crowd, every fire-eyed stranger who slams their fists to the rhythm of a deteriorating city. The beasts forced humanity inward, gorged on your food supplies, razed entire towns and cities who could not afford a barrier like Nadir's. Who else could possibly be to blame?[break][break]
Yet you look upon the tragedy they speak of – thirsty mouths, lifeless eyes, hands that steal and hands that break. Dragons stole from you the afterimage of a man you can scarce remember. Dragons freed you from another man, still, who held you prisoner in that closet five years of your life. You cannot hate them for “crimes” you never saw committed. What you can hate are the ones who stand inside these walls, cowering, pointing their fingers everywhere but at their own selves; the ones who sit by as mouths go thirsty, eyes stay lifeless, hands steal and break, a little girl too young to be a mother loses the one love of her life. You can hate them, oh, how you can.[break][break]
Hate, though, not dragons, is what really sullied these streets. It will take more than a single girl standing against it to change things for the better – but if change starts not with the individual, then where?
[googlefont=Roboto Condensed:700|Montserrat:300]ONE
build a fire
A THOUSAND MILES AWAY TO LIGHT MY LONG WAY HOME
His funeral is in the fall, and through it all, you stand hard as a stone. A testament to your strength, perhaps, bred in bone and unleashed for the world to see even at such a tender, young age. That's what your mother says to the others in the aftermath, anyway. Manipulate and redirect. It's better they think you strong than unfeeling so early in life, for even with an ending so similar, one is a “blessing” and the other a “curse”. What child, after all, feels nothing at the loss of their beloved father?[break][break]
You don't remember him. Not really. There's a silhouette of a man where you believe he must have been, a whisper of words too quiet to make out, too nondescript to pinpoint on any one person. There are always stories of how he would hold you in his arms or bounce you on his knee or curl up around you like a fortress of stone to keep out night terrors of gargantuan spiders and bullies with ten thousand arms – but they're words, not images. He's an idea to you, not a person. You cannot love the idea of someone. You cannot miss them when they're gone.[break][break]
“Dragons did this,” your mother's spindly uncle tries to console you. (What is there to console when you do not grieve?) “Your old man went down fighting. You should be proud of him.”[break][break]
Hatred infects their eyes as they speak of them, all razor-fanged, bleeding-eyed, innocent malice. Understanding, as with most things, fails you, but you nod your head because you're a “smart” girl, “good” girl, and maybe, someday, you'll take his place in the fight for “liberation”.[break][break]
(But you can't love an idea of a human. And you can't hate the idea of a monster who has never done you any harm.)[break][break][break][break]
TWO
i ride a comet
MY TRAIL IS LONG TO STAY, SILENCE IS A HEAVY STONE
A well-behaved child is achieved through very simple criteria. It's easy, once you understand the formula. Simply:[break][break]
Smile with mother, but never without. Thank her for her kindness, but never beg for more. (Your father brought in money through his work, his spoils of war. You don't ask for more because there is nothing to afford more; you want as every child does, but you hold your tongue still, and they wrongly think you selfless for it.)[break][break]
Work harder than all of your peers, in school, in chores, in life. Two adults, one living, one dead, brought you the greatest gift of all, and as their spawn, you must pay them back with every ounce of your effort for bringing you to life. (Perhaps it's not duty, however, but necessity. Has Mother the strength to cook your meals, wash your clothes? Maybe she did, back in those days when Father was more than the hollow space at your table, in your home. These days, you think it takes all she has to look you in the eye.)[break][break]
Speak only when spoken to. Say nothing that would wound your late father's pride, nothing that would draw unnecessary attention, nothing that does not improve on silence.[break][break]
The last of these is the most important. It must be, for it is the one you are reminded of the most. Never kiss and tell, the other children chant to each other on the playground, skin blotted purple, skirts pulled up high, hickies on necks, all imitations of the world outside the schoolyard. They're always in such a hurry to grow up – I want to be a doctor, I want to be an actor, I want to be someone – and they think they know everything about the adult world, the ins and the outs, that they'd meld right in if only they stood just five inches taller. They don't, of course. You've seen it with your own eyes: what alcohol does to a man, the primal urges of the human race. Willing or not, you've been dragged into it, and it has swallowed you whole.[break][break]
He touches you first when you are only twelve. A child – a child, tight-lipped, never wishing to be a nuisance. There is reverence in the way his hands (twice the size of your own, enough to engulf, enough to devour) glide across first the skin of your arms, then of that which he reveals, inch by inch, from beneath your prettiest Sunday dress. Untouched by age. By war. You hadn't thought twice in following him, because he was your father's best friend, strongest ally, right-hand man; what would your “old man” think if he saw the both of you now?[break][break]
“So you can cry after all.”[break][break]
Lips pressed to tear-stained cheeks. Your sobs are silent; your body is numb. You pinky promise not to tell a soul – for your mother, your poor, poor mother, how would she handle the news? – and he leaves you, broken like a discarded doll in the storage closet.[break][break][break][break]
THREE
born to hear my name
BORN TO WALK AGAINST THE WIND - NO MATTER WHERE I STAND, I'M ALONE
You count the days – then the weeks – then the months – then the years.[break][break]
Maybe he'll tire of you, you think helplessly. Maybe the mental scars he leaves in his wake will bubble on your skin, and he'll see the battlefield carved across the canvas of your back and remember his world, remember his place, stop yearning for a city that does not fight tooth and nail for its survival and the pristine children it would breed. Sometimes, you speak of the atrocities, praying that reality will snap back to him just long enough for him to tear himself away. There's always something marring his body, multiplying like rabbits, each one a mark that sketches him ever closer to his grave.[break][break]
“Did it hurt?” you whisper, hoarse, fingers pressed to a healing gouge still red and raw and real.[break][break]
“Didn't feel a thing,” he deigns to reply.[break][break]
I wish you did, you want to say, scream. I wish the dragon would've split you in two.[break][break]
But you don't. The way the world views you both is decidedly very warped: you, iron-willed, unshakable, and the man who tells you he “loves” you, a brother-in-arms, a hero, a saint. In reality, you're nothing but a scared little girl – and only good men die young in the field.[break][break]
Summer nights pass to fall, and something in you changes. You've been playing a part for so long (dutiful daughter, stoic and unbothered, innocent and untouched) that the line between visage and act begins to blur. No longer is Karva the Lionheart a character you find yourself slipping into; she becomes your skin, and you wear her to bed at night just as you wake up in her, animatronic machine in faux fur of an animal in the morning. And in these same days, something else changes beneath that skin, right to your core: a sickness in the morning, a lump in your stomach, double lines on a pregnancy test you bought with shaking hands and the entirety of your allowance at a convenience store. You're only fourteen years old.[break][break]
It's better your mother doesn't know, and for once, you are grateful for her characteristic ignorance. If she'd asked, you would have had to construct a lie. Curiosity killed the cat, sullied the lion, shattered the image of a perfect little daughter who always did as she was told. The reality: two years spent in that awful, awful closet. Even if you told the truth, who would believe you now?[break][break]
You'll kill it, you think, this leech you've contracted from a man you wish would rot, before any other can dare to question or doubt – and yet you hesitate, just for a moment, and a single moment proves to be your undoing. Where would you go? Who would help you? Would it hurt? ...What would it be like to be a mother?[break][break]
(You go back to the closet – you struggle through it alone – it hurts, so much, so much, you think death has come for you before the father, and it's all just so unfair –[break][break]
(And you hold her in your arms for the first time, brush crimson-soaked blonde hair from a face contorted in sobs, and think that maybe, just maybe, it's possible to love the idea of a person after all.)[break][break]
You never tell him of his daughter, just as you never tell the others of all the things he does to you in this room that has become the setting of all your nightmares. Most certainly, he would take her from you. Worse, still, he could take her from the world in its entirety. Perhaps he would run out of use for you if he knew, mark you as damaged, throw you away. If it is to protect the little girl you keep hidden away from the rest of humanity, however, you will sit in that closet in silence and take it as you have a hundred times before. You can forget it all, forget him when you sit at her bedside. Reality slips away from you as you sing to her songs your mother had once sung to you; the only pendant the woman had ever had the money to give to you becomes the infant's birthright.[break][break]
In a perfect world, you would have been able to keep her. Cherish her. Lead her hand-in-hand into the future.[break][break]
The tears you did not cry for your father spill in a torrent, then, when you're forced to leave her behind.[break][break][break][break]
FOUR
live by your heart
ALWAYS ONE MORE TRY; I'M NOT AFRAID TO DIE
Every day, you pray to the gods. You ask them for health, for happiness. You ask them for forgiveness of wrongdoings. More than anything, however, you ask them for the death of that man. For five years, they ignore your pleas for help, just as the rest of your filth-ridden city turns its constant blind eye to the dullness in your eye, the lethargy in your step. For five years, your prayers go unheard. And in the end, it is not the gods that finally grant your wish. No, no.[break][break]
It's the dragons.[break][break]
How valiantly he fell in battle, they say, fighting until his last breath for the preservation of a city that can barely stand. When they had spoken of such similar things in your youth about your father, you hadn't been able to conjure up so much as an image. Now, you can see it so clearly: sunlight glittering on scales as starlight, holy claws ripping waste parading a saint right down his center.[break][break]
His comrades follow him, first in a trickle, then in droves. Like dominos, they fall, and perhaps it is cruel, and perhaps it is petty, but you welcome their deaths as penance for what they let happen to you and for the daughter they gave you only to steal away. Beyond that, however, you see the ruination of your city before it ever begins. Every fighter becomes prey, and with no barrier to keep the armies of the dead and the holy judgment of the manakete's kin at bay, it is only a matter of time before the city is raided in full and its occupants left, stripped of their protection and armor, to be picked and eaten live. You mean to take your mother and flee this place – but she is adamant, fixated on the idea of resting in her ever-nearing afterlife with the man you cannot remember, the man that she had loved. She will go, then, as he did. Into the maw of the only “gods” who answered your cries for help.[break][break]
It may be so that you, not the dragons, were the innocent malice all along. Stoic. Unshaken. Somewhere in the collapsing city, your parent struggles and suffocates – and you watch it crumple from the distance without so much as a quiver of the lips.[break][break][break][break]
FIVE
stand and fight
SAY WHAT YOU FEEL, BORN WITH A HEART OF STEEL
Nadir is bigger than your old home: in height, in girth, in population. Its streets are suffocating in their density, with crowds that threaten to trample, beggars that remain perpetually starved, disease that infects only the poor, not the rich. Many others like you have forced your way into its walls with the promise of a safe haven, but even a sanctuary can only serve so many before its walls threaten to split at the seam.[break][break]
“Dragons did this,” you hear from nearly every mouth in a crowd, every fire-eyed stranger who slams their fists to the rhythm of a deteriorating city. The beasts forced humanity inward, gorged on your food supplies, razed entire towns and cities who could not afford a barrier like Nadir's. Who else could possibly be to blame?[break][break]
Yet you look upon the tragedy they speak of – thirsty mouths, lifeless eyes, hands that steal and hands that break. Dragons stole from you the afterimage of a man you can scarce remember. Dragons freed you from another man, still, who held you prisoner in that closet five years of your life. You cannot hate them for “crimes” you never saw committed. What you can hate are the ones who stand inside these walls, cowering, pointing their fingers everywhere but at their own selves; the ones who sit by as mouths go thirsty, eyes stay lifeless, hands steal and break, a little girl too young to be a mother loses the one love of her life. You can hate them, oh, how you can.[break][break]
Hate, though, not dragons, is what really sullied these streets. It will take more than a single girl standing against it to change things for the better – but if change starts not with the individual, then where?