(R1, Late Night) Castles in the Sand (Lit)

unwanderinggirl

He hadn’t dreamt of home—of his real home, that well-crafted brick rowhouse on some pleasant street in Muffey—in at least a decade, and even that felt like a lifetime ago. Many lifetimes ago. The ironwork of the stairs, the intricate handle, and the bright painted door his mum always loved to choose seasonal wreaths for whenever possible. The foyer had white marble, hand-carved tile. He could vaguely remember fancy parties in the summer while Brunnhold was out, all the professor friends of his parents crowding in the coat room and laughing, Jana their human servant flustered to find all the right places to store them.

The tile should have been cold on his bare feet, but it was just dull and distant-feeling in his dream-state, as if he’d somehow stumbled more into a phasmonia than any actual house of his memory. Were the two mutually exclusive, really? Weren’t they the same to him? Dead. Gone. Buried. He was as much a ghost in this house as the house was an empty shell to him.

He drifted through the downstairs; everything was covered in sheets and layered in dust, abandoned and quiet, empty in the dark as if no one had lived there in years, decades, centuries as far as he knew. He found himself in the formal living room with its stuffy furniture neither himself nor his sister could ever play on and hardly ever sit on, calloused fingers running over his father’s pride and joy: the piano. They'd both had been forced to learn to play, but even that had been so long ago, Tristaan hardly remembered what his own hands looked like on the keys. He certainly didn’t remember how to read a single note of music, despite the uncomfortable hours spent squirming on the narrow wooden bench under the stern gaze of their grumpy, elderly tutor. With a sigh, the passive continued to walk through the silent half-memory, wandering into the study, past the rows and rows of books and grimoires that held secrets the gods had deemed impossible for him to ever understand.

The kitchen he’d spent so much time getting into, rummaging for snacks when no one was looking and being chased out by Jana’s apron as she prepared meals, cheeks full of whatever he could snatch from the cutting boards before getting caught. The dining room was all cobwebs and no glory, the beautiful crystal chandelier dull and tarnished over the long table coated in dust. No longer full of guests and laughter, no smells of delicious edibles to make one’s mouth water, no shallow conversation skirting the delicate balance of things in Anaxas, pinkies raised while fingers curled around flutes of wine so expensive they could buy entire villages of humans without a second thought. None of it mattered anyway. Fine porcelain that had been in his mother’s family for a handful of well-recorded generations sat unused and forgotten in the cabinets, and moonlight that filtered through the curtains danced off all the glass surfaces like starshine.

Then he found himself climbing the stairs, hand on the intricately carved bannister full of ridiculous flowers and plants and fruit. He didn’t need to see any other rooms, not really. He’d seen enough, but still he crept to his doorway and stood in the threshold. His tiny room with his wrought iron bed, his wardrobe, his little bookshelf and his beloved toy chest. Sprawled across the floor was a great battle scene, and it drew him in, silent feet scuffing on layers of memory like so much dust. Wooden Seventen soldiers all in a neatly, painstakingly organized battalion marched across the woven rug, the two in the lead mounted on cartoon renditions of chroven. One had a red feather in their baret, and the other brandished a blade. They were charging over a mess of blocks and an upturned tea set stolen from his sister’s room, onward to vanquish a handful of stuffed animals and hand-carved mythical beasts, a few lines of human infantry fodder all ready to accept their inevitable death in the front lines like any good fodder should. Gently lifting the two from their places as he knelt down beside his childhood playscape, Tristaan turned the Seventen over in his hands. Jana had fretted and fussed over his persistent, annoying request, but the jacket of one brandishing its threatening blade had a sloppily sewn “T” over the breast pocket and his red-capped companion had a very crooked “N” in matching black thread.

The passive sighed, remembering his childhood promise made in secret between himself and Nevenia. Seventen together.

As he studied the blank wooden faces for answers, an orange glow began to fill the room from over his shoulders. The glow danced and fluttered—

Fire. What the—

Flames licked the curtains and began to nibble their way up the fancy striped wallpaper of his room, curling toward the ceiling as if alive. Dust and cinders and smoke were quick to fill the room, fill the hall, spill down the stairs even as Tristaan backed away and all-but stumbled back to their bottom, shoulder slamming into the door that wouldn’t budge. Calloused hands tugged the handle, pushing and shoving, but nothing gave. The sound of the flames consuming the house room by room were deafening now, smoke and dust blinding as they filled the spacious old rowhouse, devouring it from the inside out. The lines between sleep and waking were already blurred, and in the face of so much fire, everything suddenly felt very real. Twisting, the passive smashed an elbow through the stained glass decorative window next to the front door, splintering it open in a spray of colors and sharp edges clawing and snagging his already long-ago scarred skin. As he shoved himself through the narrow opening, he expected to fall onto the cobblestones below with a sickening thud.

Instead, there was a soft hiss and he found himself pressed against sand. Turning to look up at the row of Muffey townhouses he’d grown up in, flames still gnawed away at them all. Clambering to stand in uneven surface under his feet, the smoke that poured out of the windows began to shift and grow heavy, soon turning into the same pale sand he’d landed in. Flowing like water, smashing through the upstairs windows, a deluge of sand instead of hot fire spewed into the street below, threatening to bury Tristaan underneath it by sheer force and weight.

He didn’t even have time to shout, so quick was the rush of fine, hot weight, sending him scrambling. Only he wasn’t fast enough. It was impossible to be fast enough. There was too much sand. It was all too much, too heavy. Swifter than fire, burying him under it’s shifting, oozing mass before he could even move but a few feet from his own stairwell.

Struggling to keep moving forward, hands flailing to dig, the hissing of pouring sand filling his ears above his own pulse, the passive tried desperately not to give up even as the stars in the clear sky above were consumed by fire and his chest felt crushed by a the ever-moving weight of an entire desert—


—There was a chubby foot lodged into his rib cage, minuscule toes curling into his tanned, clammy skin. With a gasp, half expecting fire to still consume his vision, Tristaan startled awake just as the second toddler foot landed unceremoniously across his bare chest, tiny mumbles drifting from tiny lips as his not-quite-yet-three year old son turned sideways in his sleep next to him. As always.

Alioe, I’ve never deserved your kindness.

Heart rattling against his sternum, trying to break free of bone and muscle and flesh like it was so much stained glass, he laid still for several deep breaths, unable to move, trapped between the soft, comforting warmth of the witch he now called his wife and the hot, squirmy mess of a boy he knew as his child. He’d grown accustomed to the weight of her faint field, though in his half-manic dream state it suddenly felt heavy and oppressive—a reminder of things never meant for him like that rowhouse so many thousands of leagues away in a country now completely on fire from the inside out. Shifting in his own sweat despite the almost-cold desert breeze that drifted through the curtained open windows of their tiny (but luxuriously larger than a kint) tenement house somewhere on the ambiguous edge of Little Anaxas, he gently turned to slide his arms under sleeping, limp frame of the small boy that slept next to them, though his muscles ached and protested the motion after so much time tense in nightmarish action.

Kieran was no longer a babe, all legs like his mother but with sharp knobby elbows and sharp knobby knees, the softness of toddlerhood waning each passing season too fast and too soon. The curly-haired boy exhaled in protest, one grubby hand reaching in unconscious reflex for his father’s face even as he was laid back down at a more agreeable angle to accommodate everyone else's sleeping habits. Tristaan couldn’t help but press his lips against those little round fingers before placing the wick boy’s hand back down onto his little round tummy. Sometimes the man still struggled to comprehend at how such a life could have ever been made by himself in the first place, let alone how anything else still was his after all this time. Sand through his fingers.

With a sigh, he slid his way out from between the warm, slumbering bodies of those he loved—those he called fami—off the soft mattress and onto the cool floor it sat on. Quietly, desperate to keep from waking anyone else even though he was sure everyone in their building and possibly in the whole sprawling city itself could hear his pulse still pounding in his skull, the passive crept over painted tiles to slip out onto their narrow balcony and lean against the baked clay wall that looked out across their now over-crowded refugee neighborhood and up into Thul’Ka proper. The sky was lightening, just barely hints of blue instead of velvet black, far beyond the intricate spirals and domed spires, far beyond the layers upon layers of walls that divided the city by history more than anything else. With the sun would come the oppressive heat, a heat Tristaan was convinced he’d never, ever get used to, convinced he'd never, ever wanted to. For now, under the last of the stars in a cloudless, moonless sky, however, the air was noticeably cold, pinching at his clammy, bare skin and raising goosebumps along smooth and scarred lines alike.

Elbows protested their grinding into rough stones along the top of the meager overhang as he ran calloused hands through his thick, dark hair, exhaling through clenched teeth, feeling more than slightly desperate to break away from the oppressive, shifting mass of so much dream sand still sliding into his consciousness. Everything slowly came back into some semblance focus. His head gradually stopped spinning. But the world below his feet never stopped moving.

Or did it?

Stuck here, in all the desert heat, so much felt still, stagnant, and unmoving. Tristaan knew that was just an illusion, a mirage in the dunes beyond the farthest city walls, though. This cramped place was just another powderkeg, crawling with explosive ants under the surface like some horrible spell under so much pale Anaxi mixed-racial skin.

Steel grey eyes scanned the utterly unfamiliar landscape spread out below him, from the phosphors in the shared courtyard between the surrounding buildings to everything beyond, there was little recognizable in this life besides those who slept within the reach of his hands. And nothing, if he was ever willing to admit it, would be the same again, here or elsewhere … consumed by so much blood and fire, separated by so much sea and sand.

The passive had come to realize home for him could never be a place, and yet it seemed so ingrained in the nature of his existence to long for such a thing. Abandonment hadn’t wiped it out of him. Beatings hadn’t bled it out of him. Spoke life hadn’t wandered it out of him. Love hadn’t softened it out of him. It still burned somewhere, buried deep in his chest, twisting and writhing: dreamfire.

Home.

What did that word mean anyway? How was he to define it any better than he'd come to define himself?

As long as it had to be a place for the magic-less son of a galdor to feel satisfied, it would always be nothing more than a castle in the sand.

One more slow, pained exhale and Tristaan let his arms slide away from the balcony, suddenly feeling chilled to the bone. He pulled his eyes away from the exotically alien Thul’Ka skyline and padded on quiet bare feet back into the bedroom. Crawling carefully back under the thin linen sheet, his chilled skin was met with a sleepy hiss of protest from Sarinah, even as he curled himself into the familiar lines of her body like an exhausted animal. His arms wrapped into comfortable places with practiced ease while the witch settled against him, one work-worn hand settling over the budding roundness of yet more new life hidden in her belly: another room to build into the house of his heart. Face buried into her hair, the man closed his eyes again with only a hint of caution, half expecting more flames to lick the backs of his eyelids all over again. Met with only darkness, he relaxed, slowly giving himself permission to drift off into sleep before another hot desert day burned itself into existence.