Written by Atlas Keighley
Content Warning: Death
You exhale, silver moths pouring from your mouth and winging their pale way into the sky. There’s a shudder to your bottom lip and the tip of your nose is red with the cold. The child of a land crushed kingless.
The silhouette of a citadel turned dark against the stars stands in front of us, and the stars shiver with sudden shadow. Neither of us speak for a while, eyelids heavy and throats stinging with the remnants of foul, bitter smoke. The silence is broken by you, gently, quietly, asking what words I have clenched behind my teeth tonight. I do not bestow upon you an answer, content with the quiet wrapping around my mind. So I kiss you instead, for once without a silky tale to spin, without telling you that everything would be alright. On a distant horizon, the flames are starting to die, their thick smoke being carried across the sea to faraway lands that couldn’t leave us be.
We, too, are burning.
We, too, crack like ice between teeth.
Outside the walls of a city drowned by night, we sit with our backs to the mountain, mouths filled with the ashes of things we could’ve said, and the dead wood of silence. The streets had echoed emptiness; no more drawn blades, and no more oaths left to be broken. No weavings of gold and silver lulling us to sleep. Our minds wandered those broken streets.
‘What songs,’ you say, ‘could ever be sung about tragedy?’
I’m hiding the answers under my tongue, like I should, like I always do, and we fall quiet, brittle grass against our backs, and cold seeping under our clothes. Your name slips from my mouth, lighting every candle in the sky, fervently pushing back the fog settling over my mind. It was a spark, a faraway star, a fire rekindled, but it wasn’t enough.
We die with our backs on the mountain; a burning poison in my veins, your blood staining the hard soil beneath us. The last of those little silver moths made a desperate bid for freedom, of a kind we had never been given.
I’m not sure who went first. I imagine it was me; I had always had a bite for competition, and I couldn’t bear the thought of being alone. But somehow, feeling the pain of you losing me seemed much worse. The distant cry of morning birds may not have been birds at all, but my cooling body would not have felt the remnants of warmth in your desperate, fading hand. It was almost nice. Granted, I could no longer force my body to do as I asked, but my eyes were clear, and I couldn’t taste the ash on my tongue. I couldn’t hear your laboured breathing, and as selfish as that is, I could imagine you were no longer wounded, and we were laying under the stars by choice, a bottle of mead between us.
Author Bio:
Atlas Keighley (they/them) is a fourth year Queensland creative whose mission is to make art with whatever they can get their hands on. They began their Bachelor of Fine Arts journey in Wollongong, NSW, and transferred to QUT for a broader learning experience. Rightfully so, it seems, as their work has been published in ScratchThat’s physical magazine, online newsletter and website, and they have branched out their creative fingers into many artful pies, including beginning their own jewellery business and publishing works on Substack. There, you can find prose, poetry, general dissonance with the world’s political state and other horror themes (though of the fictional sense). To find delicious updates on either of these endeavours, you can find details through @blacktoothcreations on Instagram.