the lament river still is running (under the pendulum sun | ariel~cathy)

[fiachairecht]

the lament river still is running. under the pendulum sun - jeannette ng, ariel~cathy. ariel doesn't know how to die, cathy doesn't know how to kill, and everyone's covered in blood and Doing Quite Fine, Thanks. 1.1k words, rated m. for ladiesbingo round 6, 'dark tone'.

I was dreaming of Ariel almost before her body stilled in my arms.

The forest was not far gone from the mists, after all, especially here on the edges where nothing had quite finished being grown, and Ariel's blood - thick crimson, inhuman and unreal and all entirely undeniable as it soaked into my skin - gave it ample raw material as Ariel's sobbing faded into echoes of whimpers like the remnant edges of a half-remembered dream.

I ached for her, in a way I never could have imagined mere hours ago - if hours meant anything to creatures like me and Ariel. The first stroke of the knife felt as though it must have pierced something of my body as well, though I didn't dare take my gaze from Ariel's to check. After all she had been to me, it did not feel right that she should die without knowing that I was with her, wholly and completely.

I don't know how long I held her body, Mab's laughter ringing in my ears. I didn't know how long it would take for the hunt to catch up to us.

I don't know why I dragged her back into the tangled hollow of half-formed roots where she had waited for me.

 

**

 

The first time I had dreamed of Ariel she was sitting in the solar with her knitting. Her fingers were fast, faster than mine if not as deft, but when I looked down she was knitting not yarn but ropes of sunlight and her own hair.

"Inhuman work for inhuman hands," she said then. "It is why Ariel Davenport's family could never find a craft for me. When the Pale Queen came for me she saw my true talents."

The words were too true for a dream, unless this was the only space in which she could speak such truths. I did not know then that her tongue was not that much freer than the Salamander's.

Her knitted shawl grew quickly, in that dream. It overflowed her lap, spread to my armchair and swirled around my legs with all the swiftness of a snake. Ariel did not watch it, but she smiled anyway, her wrists dipping forth and back as she wound the shawl tighter and tighter around me.

"Should I tell you what your craft is, Catherine?" Ariel asked, with an edge of desperation to her voice that I hadn't yet heard.

I was suffocated, then, before I could answer, and woke to find the door to empty air unlatched. Dangling from the bolt was a single braid, colourless in the empty light of the fish-moon. I did not need to look more closely to know it for a fragment of the sunlight and hair that Ariel had been knitting, and when I woke for real to the pendulum sun's morning light, it was gone.

 

**

 

Before coming to Arcadia I had never spared a thought as to whether unreal things could die. When Laon and I put away our toy soldiers, stilled our pens for a day, the worlds we created never truly died, simply paused, patiently preserved until the next moment we could tear ourselves away from our studies and continue on with the stories.

Mr Benjamin had said the Fae were all stories, and as Ariel's bloody fingers grasped at my wrists, my cheek, leaving smears of crimson mist behind, I wondered, for the first time, if a Changeling could die, despite Ariel's insistence that I kill her. Perhaps she would simply fade into the mists, a spectre waiting to greet the next traveller and take them on to Gethsemane.

Did Changelings even need blood? What stories had I cut loose from Ariel, what words were seeping into my skin and my clothes as I held her broken body, the hilt of the knife jutting out of her ribs and pressing into mine?

Kasdaye had offered to cast my fate in blood, but it seemed such a needless offer now that my future was written quite clearly in Ariel's blood on my hands. Blood knew blood. Did Changeling blood know Changeling blood? Did it mean I knew Laon less?

Ariel's mindless twittering had driven me to what felt the brink of madness during the long spell she spent as nearly my gaoler, and now I could not help but wonder what I would pay for her to live long enough to tell me one thing more. She was taking so long to die, even after I stopped trying to press the edges of her wounds closed.

The mist was thickening around us, even as the Pale Queen's laughter grew louder and louder in my ears. Ariel was shuddering in an approximation of breathing, as if for all she didn't belong in Arcadia, she couldn't belong to death either. I could not shake the feeling that I had failed her.

 

**

 

I dreamed of Ariel while we were in the mists, before she died. I dreamed that I plucked the mist from around us and willed it to be Changeling blood, I dreamed that I pressed it back into her, an intangible deep red river flowing back inside her body. I dreamed that there was Ariel-blood on my skirt and mist-blood under my nails, and I dreamed that I could feel the slick ridges of her wounds against my fingertips as I worked my hand deeper into her, sliding under her ribs with my fistfuls of not-blood, willing her to live.

I dreamed that I pushed my hand into her again and again and again, until I could not tell where she ended and I began, where the mists ended and the blood began.

If I could kill her and not fall to the Pale Queen's plans, could I force her to live and still not be saved?

Ariel had no soul to be saved. I did not expect that would make it harder to accept that her constructed body could not be saved, either. I would stitch her back together with tree branches if I could, but I was no Salamander, and the mists would not answer to me.

I dreamed that I pulled her skin back so far that the knife fell out of its own accord, nothing left to cling to. I dreamed that Ariel's flailing hand caught at the hollow in the base of my throat and ripped my skin away in turn, pulled me down until my lips were pressed against hers, my breasts fitting into the gashes I had cut into her torso.

I do not know if Ariel dreamed. I do not know if she died, though I know I killed her.

I wondered, for a time, if our two soulless bodies belonged together as well as they fit against each other, encased in mists. If we could be forever suspended, neither fallen nor saved but something only the other knew, something the Pale Queen could never again touch.

 

**

 

I dreamed that Mab found us in the hollow roots of a not-tree, and no Fae hands could pry Ariel from my embrace, and after that, I did not dream at all.