A Promise of Light

It breaks my heart to know that the truest vision of me is not myself anymore, but rather my image upon the iris of a beautiful star.  Heartbreak and comfort.  The two are so intimately co-mingled now.  As it should be, I suppose.  Asha, where else would I wish to live if not in your arms?  At least upon the surface of your eye I can taste our reason, mirrored.  I can feel myself in the curve of your shoulders and hear myself within the secret songs.  To know myself as a dream held in the heart of another.  Mirror and star, once again.  The horror of before, when that mirror was shattered, and I wept as angels do when they are finally cast out.

   Hopeless, lost.

   When rage and sorrow coexist.  Skies darken and hatred howls in the blood.  Midnight of the day.  Chaos seems to rule, and our beloved ones lie messy and broken at our feet.

  We curse our fathers, Asha.  We curse our kings.  We make vows, darkest vows that last for countless lifetimes.  Vengeance is so corrosive.  I know that better than most.  Yet its promise is still held so dearly in my breast.  Mirror and star.  My name held in your gaze.  All the ways I tried to get back to you.  All the ways I failed.  To cheat death, to call down new life.  To search fable and buried worlds looking for a miracle.

   There were no miracles to be found to bring back my girl, to restore her flesh.  Or so I thought.  But then, a millennia of musing and suffering, and it came to me.

   A violation.  A crossing, upon this inverted sky.  Desecrating darkness itself; a holy act.  Unknown, unimagined.

    Callous Ones, you talk of black stars and inversions, but do you really know what it means to fall?

    You think I honour life, and I do.

    But the king is a murderer, in dreams.  I tore creation itself to bring her back.  I tore the temple, the sky, the earth and the flesh.  I've been falling for a thousand years because of that tear.  Falling through the pupil of an incomprehensible eye.  Bluer than I ever imagined.  Wounded, bleeding, triumphant.

    Fierce as the day you took her from me.  You only know what it means to sin. You know nothing of what it means to hold a sin, or all sins.

   You broke the spine of my dreaming on the day she fell at my feet, lifeless and murdered. The day the sky darkened at noon.  The day the birds became silent and the forests hushed.  The day you truly taught me how to hate.

   They say the city began to fold.

   Fallen, you stole everything from me.  But I am more than living torment, more than silver storm.  I am Love, eternal.

   I am he who slays creation, for her alone.  I am my father's worst angel, and his most treasured.  I am not the devil.  I'm something much, much worse.  I'm the dangerous one.  A living death, incarnate.  Shadow and light, twinned, made flesh.  I serve the truth, terrifying as it is.  So humankind might know its own depths and wonders.  Those integral secrets you withheld from them, Callous Ones.  They deserve the truth.  My father is merciful, and so I exist.  My father is loving, and so I come – and come again.

   My Vahishta lives as flesh once more, as do I, and she recalls those feathers now.  Together we shall do all we can to heal this place, and rouse our forgotten heartsong from the soil.  Life, an emerald star, fell once more from heaven.  A dream upon the eye of a lost, holy child.  And where before there was only barren darkness, now there is a promise of light reborn.