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“You, drowning
Between my arms -
stay.
You, pushing your body
into the river
Only to be left
with yourself -
stay.”
- “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” by Ocean Vuong
---
When you crawl, knees bloodied and wet, out of the River, your mouth finds the crusted rivulets of sand, licks the taste of salt and bone and fat into your bloodstream, eager to satiate the gaping maw of hunger in your chest. You’re naked, too long hair unspooling down your spine, memory like water, finding the ridged topography of your bones. You gag, and Alecto whispers: it is time.
She loves your body - you know this. When her planet sized soul, already shredded into so many dirty pieces, slid in between your ribs, unraveled from the Body and went unto you, you felt full to bursting, rapturous and choking, until you lost where your numerous clamoring souls ended and you began - you saw the beginning of things, billions of years ago, beyond your comprehension - bubbling red, sulfur, riotous water teeming with life; beings with skeletal structures rearing up to a pink and orange sky, stars twinkling; snow and ice and the first spitting flicker of fire from brown hands, calloused and worshipful.
You feel Alecto’s longing, green, pulsing, riotous; her love smudging the edges of everything until it was your love too, her ancient heaving worship spilling into the infinite undulations of life. Knee deep in the river, souls slipping joyfully past your calves, stinging you with kisses, the body of God laid bare and bloody before them. The Tower beyond, Varun shuddering in its many stones, until it too began to crumble. Alecto closes your eyes, and you sink beneath the muddy water, thick with what was no longer devilish but purposeful, chasing something glowing and immeasurably beyond.
You are on the shore, and she tugs at your mouth, she is your God, and you obey. The waves of the River rapidly retreat, and there’s something white and blinding at the horizon. You feel a tug at your navel and gag, bloodied spit sticking to the first soul that comes crawling out of your maw. You moan, and something bursts inside you, dies briefly, wondrously, and the two year old infant of the Ninth slithers into the River. From then, they fall from your mouth like stones, Alecto whispering names as they tear your mouth leaving, names you know instinctively and will know forever, and you scream in agony and relief. You were always so full, and the empty parts left over are flooded by your God, and it is divine.
When the final child leaves you, you shudder and feel your ribcage hitch around the fragmented soul still left inside you, and Alecto tugs, and you refuse, you cry tears of blood and you scream and dig your fingernails into the ground as the white light begins to glow around your body. Not yet, my Lord, you cry, and she is silent.
At the end of all things, the planet murmurs, you would still return to her.
Lord, you say, I have been saving her place.
Alecto shifts, and you feel her kiss your insides, your intestines and lungs and feeble beating heart. Dominicus is dying, she is pensive. Quickly, Beloved.
She shudders, and you feel her leak from your skin, and you are bereft, crashed to your knees and palms clasped in beggarsome prayer. The water roils and you watch her, quick as sunlight, a shimmering mirage of insects, begin to feast on God. The light blinds.
You crawl into the River for the last time, close your eyes, and drown.
—
When you come to, you are warm, the dying rays of Dominicus streaking down across your naked skin, salt licking your body through slight familiar waves. You smell dust and bone, and long for the comforting stretch of oss under your fingertips. You blink, and rise, body cushioned with unfamiliar pockets of fat and muscle. You think it fitting, perhaps, that in all of your devotion to being sheathed you come to your end the same way you entered the world.
You know, with the certainty of a beacon, where she is. You can feel the pleased bits of her fluttering about your throat, a swansong to their beloved host. When the war with God ended, you felt the River spit them out, felt the pulsing bits of bodies and souls flickering around your consciousness as Alecto tenderly filled all the gaps. You know with all the certainty of blind faith where she is.
Your heart shakes and tremors as you pick your way through sand, wild grass, and glass and bone. The terror of loss seizes in your lungs and you miss Alecto, her ancient certainty. Your body remembers the crushing weight of eating her, of salty blood running down your chin, the way you begged your body to surrender to death and how it so desperately insisted on living. Tears streak your cheeks as you turn, familiar iron a graveyard of homecoming. And She is there.
Her body is all the evidence she ever needed of God as a facsimile of the divine. Golden brown skin dimmed gray and milky in its pallor, greasy too long hair woven through with the bones of infants, her body ripped open and pulsing with its emptiness. Something stills in you, the noise of unreality settling into purpose.
She is fondling the iron, blood crusting about her chest and mouth. The impermeability of her skin died as John did, and Gideon, at the end of things, pierces her once unfeeling hands through spikes of iron. She gasps, and you choke on your desire.
A thousand and one sermons in your mouth, and they die on your lips. “Griddle.”
“Come to see me off yourself, Nonagesimus?”
You fall to your knees. “Gideon - Kiriona Gaia - first flower of my House, Beloved - the empire falls, God is dead, and I have come to resurrect you or be felled at your hand.”
She looks off to the sky, rapidly darkening, and the once familiar crooked pull of her smile is pained. “What’s the point, Nonagesimus? I’ve wanted to die for years, and now that Dad’s dead I might actually have a shot at it. You’ve got your slab of freezer meat, your God, and even if you don’t have the Ninth, you can find another planet to fill with your worship. Honestly, I -”
She yanks her broken hand off and pushes it through her hair, dead and rotted blood pulsing weakly down her forehead. “I don’t even know why you’re here. I’m dying. I think I’ll walk to the ocean, just walk in and keep going until I drown. I’ll even let you do the honors of holding me down.” Her eyes are cloudy, unfocused. “The River seems nice, now. Peaceful.”
You are an unwrought, blasted thing. You grovel toward her, supplicant and aching with the nearness of her. “Beloved.”
You take her bloody and ruined palm. You run your tongue along it, eagerly tasting. She is everything you have yearned for, since even before cutting open your brain to preserve her. She is salt-wet-rotten, and you send a prayer to the beauty of her bones. The one thing He did not ruin. You kiss her knuckles, you suck her fingers into your mouth, memorizing the shape of them. You look up.
You will never not know the truth of her eyes, the way they burn like fires in the distance. Something flickers in their deadened remains. “Beloved.”
Her eyes shine with unshed tears. “Stop it. Let me die.”
You press kisses to her inner wrist, its cool marble. You lick along frozen veins and feel the curve of her arms, slithering closer until her hand presses limply against the swell of your breast. You are reminded of your nakedness, and delight in your devotion to Her. Her hand jerks and stutters against you.
You press your damp forehead to her abdomen, cheated of the experience of knowing her skin by the layers of white silk. You murmur, digging nails brokenly into her hips, dragging breaths to take in the sin of her smell. “Death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
She shakes, and shakes, and pushes weakly at your head. You pull yourself to standing, touching first the gaping wound at her neck and then her chest. “Behold, I am making all things new.”
“Harrow,” she gasps, and you call on your God, and the final fragments of misplaced soul delight in the herald of Alecto.
Alecto comes into you like a rush, a waterfall of joy. She who has consumed the old order is eager for rebirth. You feel only a shallow throb of jealousy that she shall have the pleasure of touching your first and greatest love. With her blinding light, you press your mouth to your Beloved.
Gideon cries then, great gasping sobs as she opens her mouth to you. You let your tongue feel around her mouth sweetly, feeling the edges of her teeth, and bite down on your own lips, letting your blood mingle with her saliva. She gulps, and you reach out, tenderly, probing with your soul along the jagged edges of her.
You find her clinging to the rancid bits of her body, John’s teeth, begotten of his enemies, sticking around the maw of her chest. She is a trembling, angry thing, red and quaking, and your tears run down your mouth and over her chin. You let Alecto touch each part of her, and she recoils, shaking with fury. It is fine. Your Beloved was never meant to worship any God.
You murmur to them both, nonsense words, and beg Alecto to tend to her dead flesh. You were never one for work of the Body or the Soul, but you know Gideon’s soul better than you know your own. You feed the glowing warm bits of her back into her, even as she chokes and cries, run your fingers up and down her body and pinch and kiss to call her into the living. You pull at the sour root and blow blessings into the ragged edges, stitching her missing pieces together. Tugging, you coax the necromancy thudding dully in your blood, slipping away slowly and surely as Dominicus, to gift you one last thing.
You open your chest, first the skin, then muscle and sinew, then crack your bones until the wet thud of your heart beats against open air. You touch her chest, then, Alecto’s warm hand having plucked the teeth and blown warmth into her dead flesh. You press close, until the beat of your heart is thudding loud in both of your ears, until the memory of salt water and grease paint and a kiss on the brow consumes you both. Your heart touches her wet and bleeding flesh.
“Harrow,” she whispers, and you have never been closer to God. “I’m afraid.”
“Gideon Nav,” you say, and your voice is clear, resounding. “I have done you the great disservice of loving you with a wretched, selfish heart. I have made myself your captor, your necromancer, your mausoleum. At the end of everything, I ask you for my last and most important thing: one mortal life, free. Gideon Nav, I give you my soul and my heart. Will you take it?”
Alecto sings inside you, a symphony of angelic noise. The end is near. You touch her face, press up to kiss her between her brow. In so doing, you feel a tug.
The tug on your soul is shy, insistent. It is agonizing to release it, to unspool it from the rest of you and let it swim its way to shore, even if the shore is the safest place you’ve ever known. You let your heart grow, blood and cells multiplying, stretching, separating until it stretches and settles into the cavity of the gap between you. In the vast moment of reckoning, when the switch occurs, you feel the ecstasy of union, fleeting and bursting, and you both cry out, falling to the ground as Dominicus shudders, and winks out.
You hear her heartbeat before anything else. The great, resounding thud of it, the tentative brush of fingers against your own. Warm and whole. Alecto swirls between you both, growing and growing until a great sigh, and release -
She empties into herself, and the Earth shudders awake. There are so many stars, and the water kisses the shore, a homecoming. You roll into the warm mass of the girl you love, and sit astride her, wondering. You touch the healed skin at her throat, breast, abdomen, you feel your soul shine in a spattering of black in her eyes. Her face twitches, something right and sweet stretching across her face.
You smile.
—