Something In The Way-SYLUS X MC X ZAYNE

X: Sylus

             The snow takes a man by the ankles and asks him how long he plans to stand, and I let it ask me as the morning pulls itself over the ridge, a slow bruise of violet giving way to thin gold, my boots sunk deep enough that the cold climbs the leather and tries for the bone, breath lifting in steady clouds that look like I am rehearsing vanishing, the cabin behind me holding its heat close while the trees keep their counsel. Sunrise here is honest. It does not flatter ruin or make a promise it cannot keep. It only lays a clean line across what is, and I have needed the clean line because the night put too much of the past into my hands.

I tell myself to think clearly and the first thing I find is her, not as a name, not as a collection of features, but as a gravity I have learned to walk by, and I begin the inventory that always starts in the same place, the old ache and the old certainty and the way time has started to behave like a corridor that is steadily narrowing around us, the walls coming closer with a patience that feels like fate, and if there were a safe way to open her chest and remove what glows there like a captured star I would do it and give the light back to the sky and walk her into an ordinary life of winters that are cruel in familiar ways and summers that smell like fruit, I would do it even if it meant I burned out on the spot, because there have been too many times when I loved the flame more than the person holding it.

There was a world where she wore a crown and I let the thing in me that has claws write our future in the language of blood and oath and breaking, where I was willing to let us destroy each other because I mistook ruin for proof, and I loved her so madly and so irrevocably that reason was a word I could pronounce but not understand, and in that world we were beautiful and terrible and we ended the way stars do, bright and then not. Here something has turned in me, a hinge I did not know I carried has swung another way, and this version of her, the one who is more survivor than sovereign, has taught me the discipline of distance, the kind that watches from the edge and says live first and love second, and I can see the curse laid over her like a fine net that no blade can find, I can see how it follows her through every life and asks the same price, and I keep asking a question I may not be ready to hear answered, why her, what sorcery carried her name farther than death, and what did she lay on me that makes my existence a poor imitation when her hand is not in it.

I remember the night she slipped through my fingers, how the air took her from me and left me with a wound that did not bleed, and something answered in me, something older than the man and wider than the beast, and I tore at the veil between places with a desperation that had no language, I clawed through the fabric of time the way a drowning creature claws for shore, and I made a catastrophe big enough to write its own chapter in the sky, hundreds or thousands paying with their breath for my refusal to lose her, and when the smoke cleared there was a child in a street with heat shimmering the horizon and the Wanderers converging like flies, and even then I knew her, even then I could not pretend I had not found her again, and I took her up and I did not let the dark have her. I have tried to leave this world since. I have stood where the field thins and told myself I came by ship and would go by ship, and the memory of hull and passage glows bright and wrong in my mind like a jewel set by another hand, but the first time my feet touched this soil I knew I had arrived exactly where the larger pattern had wanted me, and I knew that leaving before she could stand up in her own life would betray everything I had already paid.

I set my vow like a stone, I will not let her down again, I will unmask whatever has set its teeth in her heart, I will take the Aether apart molecule by molecule until I can name it and then unmake it, and the only reason I put my hand into Caleb's snake-basket was to stay close enough to see the strings and the fingers that pull them, and still the truth sits just out of reach as if it enjoys teaching me patience. I say I will not watch her die and my mouth shapes the words the way a blade finds a familiar notch in its scabbard, and I mean it more cleanly than anything I have ever meant.