text: A serpent slithers through the desert. It drags its colossal body over the crunching bones of ancient victims, swishing torrents of sand in its wake. The earth trembles. Above, a dark cloud appears in the blue sky. The serpent pauses, swivels its head. It fixes a yellow eye on the cloud, watches it darken, broiling with fury, as if dragging in a long-winded breath, readying to strike. The snake doesn’t hesitate, moves fast through the desert, positions itself at the edge of the cloud’s lightning rage. There is nothing but dry, hungry sand stretching wide, and the sharp electric burn of a charged current, the taste of cataclysmic magic hovering overhead. The snake has hunted most of its life for a hidden world in the desert, a way in - looking for some sign, some anomaly. And here, beneath the first cloud to form in one hundred years, it stops. It flicks a forked tongue into the electric air one last time, coils its body. Waits. --- Leven doesn’t notice the dark swell of the cloud forming above. His eyes are on the girl - the one he’s just stabbed. A killing meant for a snake. The knife’s ornate handle protrudes from her gut, the twining vines of two filigreed snakes with inlaid ruby eyes, twin mouths, open and wide, feasting on her flesh. Leven’s hands shake as he wipes a cold sweat from his brow, smearing blood there, the truth twisting in his gut like a hot blade, a tumultuous unearthing of his own. He remembers the queen, who smiled with all her teeth as she handed him the knife. This knife has been made for a snake, the queen had said, the lie taking root, coiling the invisible threads of poison up his limbs. She made him believe the knife was made to kill a snake - but hears the words again in his mind, This knife has been made for a snake. Not to kill a snake. But to do a snake’s bidding. He wants to vomit as the truth washes over him. He replays it all in his mind - the way the magicked knife made itself quiet while he hunted for a snake, leading him here, distracting him with the heroic honor of slain monsters along the way, made him believe he was a god. It pushed its ideas in shallow waves in between its whispered admiration and praise, never letting him discover the prison it was quietly building around him, brick by brick. Until it was too late. The knife had him by the throat, squeezed until the air between the blade and the girl was gone and all that filled the space was a pulsing bloodlust. Leven lets out a shuddering breath. He leans forward, gently lifts the girl into his arms, cradles her. She shifts into him, her breathing shallow. The knife wanted her dead - but its fervor is nothing compared to the beat of his wild heart that wants her alive now, wants everything to run in reverse, wants her skin breathing into his. The knife had him walking in a haze, but now he has returned to himself, and feels the cool thrum of his own voice in his veins. He tucks a tendril of loose hair behind her ear, comes close enough to brush his agonized sorry against her temple. A single tear slides from her eye, catches his lip. The sky cracks. Lightning illuminates them like fallen stars, before they are plunged into the near-dark. At last Leven tears his eyes from the girl, looks up to the vengeful sky. The cloud above is unearthly, seething, cracking lightning fingers. A single drop of water falls directly between them, onto the knife’s handle, still embedded in the girl’s stomach. Leven watches, transfixed, as the water slides like a tear from the jeweled eye of the filigreed snake, hissing against the metal. He holds her firmly as the handle disintegrates, as if the water has become fire, the knife its bone-cracking kindling. Within moments the knife becomes ashes, grabbed callously upward by a vindictive wind. Leven only has a moment to gape at the girl’s wound, now free of the knife, the bleeding miraculously stopped, before the water drops from the sky. --- Death suits her. The sky splits open and reaches down with glossy hands of water skimming up her arms. The water rises, infinite and thunderous around her, but the midnight waves lift her gently, holding her close like a mother shushing into the starlit folds of her newborn baby’s neck, brushing a silken hand to the peach-fuzz hairline, pausing at the temple. She swallows a whole-body shiver, drifts beneath the heady scent of white jasmine stars, petals raining down on her body. She wonders why she waited so long to die, to find this place, like brushing up against a veil of gossamer wings, the whisper of eyelashes blinked against the delicate skin beneath her closed eyelids, a tendril of hair tucked behind the shell of her ear. The blooming night sky is a lid of midnight aloe, pricked with breezy stars to let in the air. She could spend eternity here, in the arms of death. The burning ache in her gut has subsided - no longer white hot with rage. The water presses weightless hands to the knife wound, washes the ache away with careful hands. There is a question beneath the water’s surface, a welcoming. The waves gather her to its watery chest, slides a hand down her face as the priests do for final rites. A re you ready? it asks between thunderous breaths, gentle somehow, then, without waiting for her answer, heaves her into the heart of its muted eternity. She is falling into the abyss. There is water all around her, pressing her in, behind and before, safe, cocooned. Down here it is quiet. She is not chosen, or other, simply a forgotten guest of the infinite seas - a home too vast to remember where all the creatures lie folded into the seams. Those creatures, old as time, brush past her, leaving the shuddering swell of changed currents in their wake, the waters shifting colder, warmer, colder again. She is too small for their notice, an infinitesimal mote risen up from the riverbed’s slurry. Above her, there is a wild crash, frantic arms loop around her waist, a heartbeat presses in the space between her closed eyes. The water pulls, beckoning her, the question still there tingling in its depths - one she can taste like a grain of sea salt pressed to her tongue - but the arms around her are urgent, unrelenting, a plea. And then she is heaved up, out, and the arms are now a mouth, pressing wildly to hers. Her mind reels back, shifts together, focuses on the shape above that is willing life back between the saturated woods of her. She opens her eyes. To him, raven black hair dripping water into his squinted eyes, down his chin, onto her mouth. The man who murdered her. And above him, looming even higher, arched like an arrow, a snake.