amaranth
The Amaranth
ivec was borne by ribbons of water, which wrote their starward couplings in red. This was a new place of speed.
²His eyes broke on the spikes above the tower, where the Void Ghost squatted over a drake-scaled drum, imbecile in its rhythm.
³And he asked of it:
“Who are you, that need no signature at all?”
⁴Three in sum, the robes of Ayem stretched towards the bright black rim of memory, roping an arc of purchase. This was a new sprinting task. ⁵And Seht held his swollen belly to its name, clockmaker’s daughter, swimming the dead confession along a century of thread, ⁶Naming her, uneaten, a golden cache of Veloth and Velothi, for where else would they know to go?
⁷“Go here: world without wheel, charting zero deaths, and echoes singing,”
Seht said, until all of it was done, and in the center was anything whatever.
⁸And the red moment became a great howling unchecked, for the Provisional House was in ruin. ⁹And Vivec became as glass, a lamp, for the dragon’s mane had broke, and the red moon bade him come.
¹⁰“The sign of royalty is not this,” a signal blueshift told him, “There is no right lesson learned alone.”
¹¹He refused the twine on her catching net, spiteful that an uncontinued people would not become fuller by their searching, and yet were wracked in their spirits for flight. ¹²But the male signals were offended, and Vivec took a fighting form. ¹³He undid his eastern light, saying to the ASV that through war, they had become brides in glass, which no power could observe.
¹⁴The light bent, and Vivec donned a cuirass made of red plates of jewel, and a mask that marked him born in the lands of Man. ¹⁵Wheeling, he spread into an insect salve, worn on the neck of hist-bulbs when at challenge. ¹⁶He roared up and fed his fingers to mammoth ghosts. The signal fires wondered if they mistook this for surrender, for Vivec had told the void that he could learn to undo it all.
¹⁷The light bent, and somewhere a history was finally undone. ¹⁸Of it, Vivec remembered the laughing of the netchimen of his village when the hunts were good. ¹⁹He marched with his father in the ash, growing strong in the hooks and sail, able to run a junk through silt. ²⁰At eleven, he sung to an ashkhan. He became sick after Red Mountain, with the nix-blood and fever, and was infirm a hundred years. ²¹His mother survived him and laid his body at the altar of Padomay. She gave him her skin to wear into the underworld.
²²The light bent, and Vivec awoke and grew fangs, unwilling to make of herself a folding thing. This was a new and lunar promise. ²³And in her Biting she tunneled up and then downward, while her brother and sister smeared across heaven, thin ruptures of dissent, food for scarabs and the Worm. ²⁴She took her people and made them safe, and sat with Azura drawing her own husband’s likeness in the dirt.
²⁵“For I have removed my left hand and my right, he will say,” she said, “for that is how I shall win against them. ²⁶Love alone and you shall know only mistakes of salt.”
²⁷The worlding of the words is AMARANTH