Multitudes

Post-mid-season finale – angst

The knowledge comes all at once, a jumble of images and feelings. No uncovering, no learning.

It all simply is.

She simply knows. She simply is.

There’s a long sword through his guts, fire at her feet, a hot, bloated wound traveling up his leg and a fever that takes his senses.

There are the spasms of poisoning, brackish water filling her lungs, a blackness pushing hard around, against, her face and neck.

There’s blood running over animal skins, coarse woven textiles. Soaking into wool. Traversing creases of silk in tiny red rivers.

Mud. Stone. Animals. Shit. Sweat. Flesh and blood and salt.

So many deaths.

Hers. His.

Theirs.

They’re standing outside a tent, grains of sand rolling between the flat of her sandals and the skin of her toes. In the desert, the night is breezy and solid dark, save the impossible number of stars scattered across the black above.

He holds her, whispers in her ear a blasphemy about the infinitude of those same stars and the wash of brighter light that rends the sky down the middle.

He promises her the same forever as the heavens.

His weight presses down on her, on mattresses of cedar bark, on bare floors of dirt and rodent dung, on wooden pallets and feather ticks. On rugs and furs and leaves.

And she rises to him. Always.

His weight becomes cold–a corpse rolled off the back of a horse. Fallen somewhere away from her, and in her grief, deep and raw, she pulls the knife off his waistband and drags it across her stomach, up her arms, opening her veins.  

She sees the pain on his face as blood pools around her pelvis, their child stillborn. She sees him choose to follow her–before she’s even gone.

He promises her they’ll find one another again.

When she collapses on the bank, the ribbon of gray water bending away into the mist, she doesn’t swallow down the pain. She lets it tumble forth in a great, wracking sob.

The shades don’t hear her, don’t see her, don’t notice.

The only thing that does is her own reflection staring back at her from the river.

It is witness enough.

Now she knows.

She hears him mutter the command as she collapses in his arms. She hears his voice in dozens of languages she suddenly understands. Sometimes it’s one word, sometimes two or three. but they all mean the same thing.

Don’t.

As she takes the blow meant for him. Rides off the edge of the cliff. Feels iron clamp around her wrists. Lays her head on the block.

As she walks out of the land of the living, breaking his promise for him.

Don’t.