Memory 5
Back home—though maybe I shouldn't burden the place with a connection to me—there isn't much in the way of escape. Too many chores to do; school when the chores run dry. And while there's fun to be found losing yourself amidst the trees and the lake, nature's context is an incessant intruder, carving its texture into life's every moment; bark that scratches your back during your first kiss, the omnipresent shuffling of leaves while you practice glaive forms, dirt so difficult to remove that your skin'll be raw when you finally do. Every sensation a chain to your rurality, and for most of us—even me—we don't hate it.
The hills are home, and their song can't be heard anywhere else; only that dirt clings so hard, only those leaves shuffle like that, and any other bark against my skin would be the touch of a stranger. Still, the mind wanders, wonders in search of novelty to stave off spiritual stagnation. Dreams filled that role for us as kids, though as time chased its tail to when we'd finally get entities, they became hopes refined through farcical conversation and nigh-murderous debate. What Court would be the coolest, what spells the strongest, and which entities the most beautiful? We'd create more answers than there were people, but like the land—cyclical and constant—so to were our responses. The rut of our 'maturation' before we could ever realize that's what it was. An ouroboros in which past was future and future is past with no escape without requisite destruction. In that, I'd argue, is the reason why despite all difference between us, save context, one wish returned time and again to make contiguous our dreams.
Flight.
The reasons given could vary, but I think it's fair to say they circled a theme—Freedom. A chance to taste a new context, have an experience never felt before, to run away from a bad home life, or seek out a wealth that could never be where you already are. Wings as hammer, the peaceful obliteration of the rut carved with a love we'd convinced ourselves of. Between the cold rejection of space and the warm embrace of earth, there'd be Freedom so pure you'd think you were in the Underside. A refuge from life's gravity; all the problems and duties and expectations that blind you to what lies beyond the rut. It's fucking stupid when I think about it. In flight, all I ever think about are my responsibilities, my regrets. You can break from gravity, go so high you can't hear the leaves, you forget the touch of dirt on your feet, but there's been no altitude that's let me break from my problems; those are scars on the heart, a rut by any other name, and the heart's gravity is inescapable.
Neither Nadia nor myself had an answer as to where we'd go next. In my sister-self's opinion, Brightgate was poison. "Too many regrets, too many enemies," she said, and I didn't disagree. Though I also rejected the idea of going 'home.' Why be around people who refused to help us when needed?
You'd seen what Marduk could do to a city as well-defended and full of fighters like Brightgate—you still felt that way?
Some things you never forgive—which left us nowhere to go and nothing to do. We had less purpose than the caterpillar clouds around us, accumulating water to fuel their stormy and inevitable metamorphosis. It left us…vulnerable to suggestions.
"Girls," Anza'centorii cooed from within our blended spirit, "I smell diamonds."
Diamonds. Opportunity. An experience worth having, and we were desperately in need of something to possess; some untainted thing with which we could feel pure again. A fundamental misunderstanding of Anza'centorii's title, but we didn't know that then; there's a good chance we wouldn't have cared.
She curled her wings, and we fell, a spear cast from on high. Air ripped past our ears, growling invectives for our desecration of this lower heaven. In all things I heard the world's rejection of us. Below, the city expanded; the thick forest of urbanity with its artificial glades transitioning, as if by sorcery, into glass towers and concrete apartment complexes, the trees and stones that make a city. Anza'centorii didn't aim us at either, choosing instead a park—a memento natura—to be our target. Despite or because it was host to a festival.
Anza'centorii had the good sense to not drop us into the thick of the crowd. Nadia and I didn't know how well known our face was, but, going by Dinah's sharp-shift of opinion upon hearing our name, prudence seemed a seed worth sowing. Our bondmate uncurled and made stiff her wings, feathers skating on the wind to provide a smooth glide away from the river of varied humanity, and toward the trees and shadows. Close now to landing, Anza'centorii returned her wings to our spirit in a progression from ankle to head, flipping us into a feetfirst landing. But where we'd intended on the trees to hide ourself, we hadn't considered they could already be hiding someone, and so instead of our ideal landing—cool soil and sun-warmed grass—we struck a girl.
Supine and wheezing, from the blow of the earth against my back, I watched with dazed fascination as the box the girl'd been carrying spilled its contents into the air. Gadgets and gear, the likes of which I couldn't identify, soaring through the air in what would be a singularly tragic display…if Anza'centorii hadn't intervened; Godtime fixing both gadgets and girl at their dramatic height.
"Godtime isn't infinite, puppy," Anza'centorii teased, implying a choice needed to be made.
Nadia and I hadn't a clue as to the game she was playing at, but I'd made my stance on 'making decisions' known, and instilled my portion of our spiritual blend with a resolute—I'm with you, whatever your choice. Nadia pouted when she made it, propelling us into the air with a kick-up that was higher than any jump we'd made before; our nature as a hybride, perhaps Division, showing its hand.
We drifted leaflike, too lazy to return to the earth in a hurry, and in the unpassing seconds of Godtime we gathered each item, returning them to their box which we tipped back into its owner's arms. This created an incongruity in her perception; she was falling and had lost all grip on her things, but at the same time, in something faster than a blink, she was held, supported at the waist by a woman's arm. As she stepped free of me, shuffling the box and her sense of causal time into a firmer grip, she found a solution to the continuity issue my actions in Godtime had created in her mind.
That being?
A moon-bright smile beaming with gratitude that accentuated the cool luminescence of her umbral skin and star-silver freckles. Then, while tucking a goddess braid behind an elfin ear, she gifted me with her name, "Zuhura." We said it back, tasting its shape, enjoying the breath stolen in recitation, but it all paled to how she looked as we did. A quick swallow poorly hidden, a tiny wiggle of ears that I felt compelled to bite, and a subtle shudder whose waves jostled every spot of decadent fat on her body.
Is the conception of your attraction always so predatory?
Only as often as I find myself in the role—I sound like Redacted when I say it like that. It's not about roles per se, but there's a ritual to these things, meetings; each motion and statement a confirmation of a participant's affiliation, their depth within it, and to what end they intend for the encounter. Zuhura's told me that she mirrored my hunger for women, that she was picturing and anticipating something that resisted repression, playing out across her body as it did her thoughts. Then she asked after our name, speaking a bit too fast, a bit too high—pleading.
"Nadine," was Nadia's answer, and I didn't have time to ask why; Zuhura wanted to know if we'd walk with her, and who would we be, sister-self and I, if we let a darling little dyke like her travel alone. I mean, people were falling out of the sky after all.
Walking beside a woman must've been new for Zuhura, she juggled conversation as if I was keeping score and silence, of any sort, could disqualify her from a continuance of my presence. It's how I learned she was new to Brightgate, having arrived by train only the previous night—and that she found Every Train, my sort-of aunt, attractive. She told me how excited she was when the invitation to EJ for the festival turned out to be true.
"EJ?" we asked, one of our few contributions to the conversation.
"Sorry, it stands for 'experience jockey.' We mix music and illusions," she said. "It's like kind of new but also old. I learned about it from this psyche-room I'd hang out it in—I've always had more of a 'life' on the NewNet than in the flesh. We'd listen to music and the room's owner was so cool, always sharing hir memory records of parties and performances ze'd go to, and one day ze shared a recording of an open mic at this small lounge. Couldn't have been more than thirty people in the audience—a third being musicians waiting for their turn. The recording was so-so performances interspersed with truly awful displays, and then this small man walked onto the stage. He said something in a language I didn't know, probably an introduction of some kind, before unslinging his acoustic guitar, lowering the mic to its soundhole, and then he played.
"First, hanging notes into the air that were long, mournful—a wind come to find you after flowing down a road in winter. Then, blown into being by the somber gale, his entity materialized; a bride whose dress burned with an ice-blue flame and whose song was a mirror to every poor choice you knew in your heart was a poor choice. When he finally sang, it was a hand held out to us in the audience—me, experiencing the recording days after it happened—to go with him into the cold depths, and we went. His song was about a boy with a dream and a fire to marry this handsome drifter that'd come to town, and how he pushed aside every friend or familymember who got in his way. It went all the way to his wedding, a small affair of no-one at all, but he ignored it thinking love would be enough. But when the man didn't show, the boy wandered from the palace back to town, discovering his love gone and home destroyed; the man was no innocent drifter but a person pursued by a Cruelty, the Dusk-Eyed Shrike. And as we were with him in the song we saw her, dark and lonesome against a grey-bone sky, the only person there to witness the young lover's tears."
As she told the story of the song, the tree-shadows deepened with a melancholy that wasn't of her intention—it wouldn't have been the song's either. The Cruelties are scary stories, beings of folk horror, and how do you account for someone to be related to that? How do you account for someone who knows that your 'motif' is, in fact, material. Step-by-step I lost myself in the consideration of whether the song was a musical account of an event, or a dramatization of a theme, "be careful who you alienate because when the dreams pops you'll find yourself alone," or something like it. I was stuck in a cul-de-sac of brooding thoughts; would they write songs about what happened in Brightgate, immortalize the tragedy I helped orchestrate and make clear my role in it? Was the name my parents gave me destined to become a metaphor, a reference to the devastation one girl's self-absorption could cause? Tell me, do they sing songs about me?
They do. I don't really enjoy them. They lack…nuance.
I doubt nuance would absolve me.
When I rejoined Nadia, we were waiting in a line beside Zuhura. She'd finished her story; the song had ended, and with it the illusory scene of bluesy woe dissolved as each sonic element dissipated. First, his mournful guitar, then his entity's song, and finally his voice, last and on the edge of breaking until it too found silence. For Zuhura, the moment shifted everything. Whatever spell that'd transported her was one she decided to chase down and learn, listening to EJ's talk in psyche-rooms, and accumulating gear like a storybook hero gathers sorcery and Conceptual weapons. All for the day she'd slink away, bond to an entity of Delirium, beginning the life she'd dreamed of. In a year, she got the invite, and as we stood before the festival volunteers with their spirit-stamps to mark attendees she was able to tell them, "I'm performing!" Earning her a very special stamp, and gifting one to me as her "plus-one."
"You must be pretty good," we said, as we entered the festival grounds. A complete understatement, and that girl took to it like a flower takes to water, joy blossoming on her face.
As we walked down the festival's mainstreet, it was quite apparent why my nudity drew no attention save appreciation. Everyone was in some state of undress, and those who wore clothes—like Zuhura—had chosen theirs to show of their favorite features without shame or restraint. There were men, thick and round as boulders, who strode with pussy out and heads held high in cheerful laughter. Women whose cocks swung to the motions of their modded-out meditation boards—therapy tools hacked so their riders could soar using their emotions for direction and lift—as they tossed out fliers to promote a stall or restaurant or event. Zuhura even pointed out a tent where members of the Palace of Love were performing free sorcerous surgery to anyone who felt a 'realignment' was needed, but this isn't to say the only attendees were we kids of Granny Gita.
Summoners who found the human form to be a falsehood placed on themselves were also in attendance, displaying varying levels of anthropomorphism. Packs of wolves debated Black/Strand deck builds over bowls of beer while a naga couple slithered by nibbling on a shared pretzel. A man with a simian face in a suit flirted with an orb of flickering light. All happening alongside those born with bodies a bit different than the average—a missing limb or the 'lack' of a sense such as sight—who rejoiced in the beauty that was theirs to claim as much as anyone. There was a woman showing off the swooping arcs of flexible ice she'd made to replace the missing portion of her legs, and a few stalls down, on a park bench, was a shirtless enby enjoying an ice cream cone held between their toes without a speck of concern that someone would be 'uncomfortable' by their lack of arms.
Sounds like the average Body Love Festival.
I'd never seen anything like it. The brochures handed out at the entrance made it clear why—history. In the Old World, the city threw similar festivals with the intent to instill pride in a populace under infinite siege because their life, their choice to live that life, was an assault upon an invisible and hegemonic regime. A bit beyond Brightgate, a town had a different kind of festival, celebrating everything hot, sweaty, kinky, and pushing convention. So when people moved from the town to the city, traditions wound together, and, with sorcery in the mix, the types of people in need grew and so did the festival, evolving into a celebration of bodily diversity, beauty, and its use as a medium of expression.
From the air, I'd worried about landing into the crowd, naked and visually hybridic, but from the ground, it sloughed from my mind; our body was conservative compared to how some people looked, and yet everyone saw them as people. They saw us as a person, even giving compliments on our tail and claws. We were beside ourselves and possessed by this buzzy warmth in our chest.
"That's joy, little brute," Secretary said, appearing as a phantom is want to do, there as if they'd never left. "To think, you—not the Changeover—almost destroyed all of this."
A centaur trotted between us, breaking line of sight for a moment's shred—gone. Their goal completed, to make us the only person in the entire festival carrying the leaden weight of shame.
We couldn't enjoy Zuhura's performance after that, and opted to wait for her at the bar one floor below. We didn't think she'd care—there was a line of people that'd bought tickets to see her, and actually loved this 'EJ' stuff—but it's the artist's nature to tally their pain despite praise's profundity. As it is the baby lesbian's to fear a woman's company is the smoke of a fledgling flame—easily dissipated; she flipped me a token, for my drinks, and struck her words carefully.
"The set's only two hours," she said, stressing the "only" hard enough to shatter the poor facade of indifference alien to her awakening nature. We knew it was; Nadia toyed with it, rolling Zuhura's words back with sly encouragement. Intending for it to smolder as we swam to the bottom of the bar's well.
It was evening when Zuhura woke us, sweaty and grateful that we hadn't left, hadn't lied to rid ourselves of her. Nadia rose from the stool, grazing Zuhura's face with our claws. "Where else would I be," she said, inducing the offer she'd been angling toward since meeting her.
"My hotel room?" Zuhura asked. Nadia's answer was to smile and lift the box with her gear.
In the matter of attraction, conceiving of it as "predatory," to use your words, I'm not unique—only honest. The pursuit of pleasure is a predatory one…if you want to be successful. You watch as the beast does, searching not for weakness but willingness; you chase, the ritual that proceeds consumption proving you're the one she wants to eat her. If there's one thing about all of this that refutes your judgement, it'd be what "predator" implies: that I seek prey.
If you saw Zuhura's expression when she asked for us to join her, when I caught her following the sway of our tail, and how close she stuck to us from the street to the elevator to the bedroom, chasing and shepherding in equal measure; you wouldn't dare imply that girl was anything but a beast of equal want. That's the beauty of it, how we dykes are predators unlike any other, hunting for our kind and luring them in using the same breath. Craving the satiation of consumption and the little death of the consumed.
"Have you done this before?" Nadia asked, resplendent in her effortless nudity. The power of it magnified by context and the implication—what the festival's nakedness lacked—that they were going to fuck. It disarmed Zuhura forcing Nadia repeated her question twice to get an answer—no.
The realization she'd admitted it was like watching fireworks in reverse—darkness filling her face. Shame was close behind, and Zuhura curled in to hide from it, and the judgement she expected. Until then, I'd been quiet, a stalwart presence and observer at my sister's side—she wouldn't be alone, but to see this girl who should be buzzing and bright be waylaid by dour passion…I couldn't do nothing.
"Then we go slow," we said, Nadia approving of my involvement. We embraced Zuhura to our chest, and said, "We'll start wherever you want, but you need to tell me what you want."
She peeked up at us from between our cleavage, blush darkening her ears, and didn't stutter in her request. "I want to taste you."
Nadia allowed Zuhura to walk her to the bed and push her onto her side—Zuhura paid close attention to how our tail complicated things. It was foreplay, a toss of kindling to nourish the great burning want that devoured the air and left us breathless. A petulant whine escaped Nadia's lips, chased by a rumbling groan from within my chest, and with fangs bared we moaned, "Taste me. Taste me!"
Zuhura kneeled, set our leg on her shoulder with a grip that wouldn't brook escape, before dipping her head, reverent as a prayer. Her tongue was flat and slow, savoring the taste of my cunt from labia to clit—
"Woah," Zuhura exclaimed, "you taste like blue lemonade!"
"Is that good?" we asked, shock electrocuting the words to a shriek.
Zuhura's answer? To clench deep into the fat of our thigh, and dig her face into our pussy, inhaling its scent, lapping at every drip and drop of slick intent to see none of it wasted. She was new to this, that was obvious, but between our thighs she'd found the ambrosia to complete her apotheosis, emerging for a breath as a lesbian anointed; a predator at peace with its nature.
"Do you always see double?" she asked, nonsequitur dragging us back from our own climax. Nadia propped herself up ready to order the girl back to work, but the command withered; Zuhura's pupils were split. Onyx halves in burnt amber that by minor magic let her see us, sisters in one body.
There wasn't much of a mystery as to how it happened. I took one look at her tongue, marbled azure and gold, and knew it was our fault. My spirit recoiled, but Nadia was quick, knotting herself to me—stay with me. I nearly did until Zuhura…
"Let's see how many fingers you two can take," Zuhura moaned, plunging inside.
It was my turmoil that turned our sights inward, and in the gap of that awareness Zuhura climbed atop the bed, prowled up our body, and wound our tail within her fist. We were captured, her fingers hooked up into the deepest parts of us. We screamed; Nadia in pleasure and I from horror.
I didn't want this, I didn't want her—she was sweet and hot and deserved someone far less broken than me, and what I craved more than anything was beyond me; Sinaya, the last person to penetrate me. The person I missed as much as Secretary, but even my own madness wouldn't let me see him, imagine that he'd have anything but contempt for me. Memories, sensations, all of it flooded out of me in a great wave of revulsion; I might've thrown up.
Why didn't you?
Nadia. She untangled us, shoving me deep enough inside that sensation of any sort felt like words on a page, an idea but not a thing. I wanted to plead with her to let me stay, prove that I can handle it, but she wouldn't have it. In an acid-etched tone she snapped, "Just sit there! I'll handle this."
And did she?
She did, and for the first time in over a year we slept in a bed.