Lyra

CONGRATS to the 16 winners of the Atlantisia art contest!!! (there were TWO HUNDRED ENTRIES so it was seriously difficult!) to everyone, I’m so grateful you chose to spend so much time living in the world of this song, and that you shared your beautiful creations with the world. for the lucky 16 participants here, I’ll be getting in touch with you all via your preferred methods to find out where to send things. Thank you ALL for being a part of the sparkflock!! 💚

[This is my entry for @sparkbirdmusic's contest!! Content warnings at the end of the post.

I hope you enjoy!]

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I received your letter on a clear evening.

There was scarcely a breath of wind over the sea. I hadn’t known true fear in years, but my heart stirred with unease when I saw an odd shape in the sky. Even from this distance, she resembled none of the island's native birds. Her long tail and amber feathers were haloed by the dying light.

A chill crept over me as I accepted that I was looking at Mist. Your messenger.

She winged lower and lower, circling, calling. I thought about hiding myself, but it was clear you’d already discovered my whereabouts, or you wouldn’t have sent her. She always used to wear herself ragged trying to carry out your orders, no matter how impossible, so she’d wouldn’t leave without delivering her message, and giving her grief wouldn’t save me.

Vertigo seized me.

I raised my hand and waved her down to where I sat on the cliff side.

With a cry of recognition, she alighted.

As I looked into her eye—she had just one, in the centre of her forehead—I was touched by a kind of mournful solidarity. She was a gentle soul, a fellow victim of your sweetness and your cruelty. I’d been fond of her back when you and I were friends. She rested her head in the crook of my elbow with a nervous little trill.

I sighed.

‘Hush,’ I whispered, my breath misting in the evening air. ‘It’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright.’

We didn’t move for a while. I just sat there, petting her, whispering meaningless comforts meant for us both as dusk fell.

When I finally unbuckled the scroll on her back, my hands were shaking. She gave me a farewell cry, took wing returned to the air, to the sky, to you.

* * *

There was something I locked away from a very early age—another me, a dream-self with feathers and hollow bones and a love for saline wind. It was there in my earliest memories, cleaved from my heart, each of us still bleeding for the other. Its crept over me at the strangest moments to haunt my senses, steal my breath and fill my eyes with tears.

I was sent away to boarding school at the age of twelve. That’s where I met you. You were fascinated by me. By our final year, we were inseparable.

And there came an evening where we stood on the balcony, talking as we always did. The sunset melted the desert off yonder so it was impossible to tell where sand became air. Neither of us had slept the previous night. There were circles under our eyes and twitching tics at the edges of our smiles. You ran your fingers through your hair and told me how you planned to become a botanist, a physician, an explorer. You were greedy in a way I sort of admired. You wanted to have everything at your fingertips.

But then you told me you’d find a cure for my affliction, as you called it. I felt like the balcony had collapsed under me.

I blurted out a hollow thank-you even as my lungs began expanding and contracting very, very fast.

With a sudden lurch, I dropped to the balcony floor. Your cry of alarm sounded terribly distant to my ears. I was choking up, my face a mess of snot and tears and alien sorrow. My other self seeped out and enshrouded me like a blanket, ghostly feathers shivering in a ghostly wind. But you couldn’t see it.

‘Are you having one of your fits?’ you said.

I nodded between sobs.

In that moment, I saw colours you couldn’t have fathomed on the horizon. They and the tears and the trembling and my feathers and the air itself were all one to me. You draped your arm limply over my shoulders.

‘I’ll find a way to save you,’ you said, ‘I promise. Some day you won’t have to feel like this any more. You can live a normal life. I’m sure. Just... hang in there for a bit longer, okay?’

That moment cracked my memory like a bone into before and after.

I realised you would never understand—and, worse, I didn’t want you to.

* * *

I procrastinated on opening your letter. My will was so slippery that evening, and my blood so icy with fear, that I just couldn’t do it right away. Instead I clung to my everyday tasks for dear life. I foraged dinner in bird form. Once my belly was full, I slipped on my humanity like a cloak and walked up to the ruin on the tallest hill. I lit my fire in my usual spot between old buildings—the shrine, the crumbling remains of windmills, the stone hut I’d restored and made my dwelling. All these fixtures were so ancient it was easier imagine they’d spawned with the island itself than been built the traditional way, but that didn’t unnerve me any more. This place was my refuge. There was nowhere in the world I felt safer.

With my evening spent and my fire burning low, I finally unfurled your scroll.

Your message went thus:

Dear Tis, I’ve found you again at last. You eluded me so long I was beginning to give up hope, but now I’ve rediscovered the island. I despaired when it wandered away into the ocean and took you with it. I spent so long investigating trail after trail only for them to go cold. You can imagine my excitement when it was sighted again. I pray this letter finds you alive and safe. I miss you dearly. Even as I pen these words, I shudder to think of what harm might have befallen you to trap you there. You’ll be free soon. I’m coming to rescue you and take you home. Wait for me just a little longer. Your friend, Craw

I read and re-read your letter until it was carved into my memory. Then, in a fit of angry grief, I threw it into the fire. It joined the embers and the stars.

* * *

A month after we graduated from university, you summoned me to your study. Its walls were hidden behind a forest of beakers and vials and contorted glass tubes that leered down from the shelves. The only window was covered by closed shutters, banishing any trace of natural light. A lamp glowed from one of the shelves, but there must have been something wrong with the oil store in its font, because it flickered and sputtered like it was sick.

You told me you’d made a decision: your journeyman project would be curing me.

That first bold statement rang in my ears, but most of what followed was lost between us. I struggled to comprehend your words or string them together usefully in my mind. I didn’t understand how you could work or even think straight in such a shadowy, suffocating place.

A cry came from your satchel. You absent-mindedly reached in and scooped up a ball of fluff: a one-eyed baby bird.

‘Oh, hello,’ I murmured. The sight of her lifted my mood and cleared my head just a little. To you, I asked: ‘Where’d that one come from?’

‘Oh, Mist?’ you grinned. ‘Gift from my parents. They found her on their travels.’

‘Ah, right.’ I wondered what broken, pillaged place she’d been stolen away from. I’d only met your parents a few times, but I didn’t like them.

You went on talking and talking and talking, but try as I might, I couldn’t really hear you.

‘Hey, Craw...?’ I said, and one point.

You gave me a long-suffering look. I realised I’d broken you off mid-sentence.

‘What?’ you said. Then, with a hint of desperation: ‘Why are you so twitchy? This is good news, isn’t it?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘What’s wrong?’

I could have said so many things if they hadn’t been lodged in the bottom of my throat.

‘Can I... hold her?’ I managed, pointing to Mist.

‘Oh!’ You chuckled in apparent relief. ‘Go ahead.’

‘Thanks.’

You proffered Mist and transferred her into my cupped hands. I cradled her close to my chest. She looked up at me and gave the sweetest little chirp. She was so small, so trusting, so helpless. Her tiny presence comforted me. I made a fresh effort to hone in on your words as she fell asleep.

‘...was the last case study I wanted to tell you about,’ you said. ‘So, they have a lot in common, really. They were all haunted from birth, just like you. No one’s figured out the cause yet, but there’s so much promise in the experiments conducted on the Chaytor twins. They reintegrated back into society after a recovery period and managed to live well-adjusted, productive lives. We might not have enough data to build a proper base for speculation yet, but that just means each new case is valuable. I’ve started a correspondence with...’

I swear, I swear I was trying to listen.

* * *

I was restless that night. My thoughts ricocheted endlessly inside my skull whenever I closed my eyes, so I tried keeping them open, but it wasn’t much better.

Moonlight spilled through my hut’s hollow windows—if they’d ever housed glass, it was long, long gone—and illuminated my possessions. Pieces of my old and new lives crowded the shelves: my flint stones, my tin mug, my bush knife, my broken watch, my garments and towels, my collections of shells, pebbles, driftwood. They were familiar as old friends. Coloured lichen grew on the walls like tapestry and dried ferns carpeted the floor. I slept in a sort-of hammock I’d managed to fashion from the sailcloth in my pack after I fled the mainland.

I could have found comfort in my things if they didn’t seem so fragile.

You could take all this away.

I whimpered, closed my eyes, rolled to face the wall.

Perhaps an hour later, I shifted into bird form and fluffed my feathers and tucked in my head, but it was no better, so back to human, back to bird, back to human. At some point I gave up on sleep entirely and just sat there, rocking to and fro. I watched the shadows rearrange themselves on the walls. I listened to the rising wind.

I didn’t move until dawn lit the eastern windows.

* * *

It was your first attempt. You handed me a draught that tasted sweet, but burned my throat.

One moment became the next without motion or explanation—

I lay on a hospital bed, swimming in a dizzy sort of pain, my head throbbing. There was a window, a scratched-up sill, a gauzy curtain masking a lavender-coloured sky.

You sat by the bed with your eyes shut and your head drooping. The light from the window bled onto your cheek. I’d never seen you so sallow with exhaustion, even in our school days.

‘Craw?’ I rasped.

You were wide-eyed and alert in an instant.

‘What did you do to me?’ I said, though it hurt to talk. ‘Were you trying to kill me?’

‘No! Of course not!’

‘Then what?’ the words spilled from my mouth, though I didn’t quite understand them. Was I so angry? I knew what you’d done. You’d explained it.

‘I was trying to kill the thing inside you.’

‘Me,’ I said, suddenly feeling awfully tired. I couldn’t even get another look at your face before unconsciousness claimed me again.

I dreamed of a broken beak, bloody feathers, a tiny racing heart, hollow bones cracked and trampled. I couldn’t breathe right. I couldn’t open my eyes. I was dying.

I woke up. The room was dark and I was alone and I could hardly feel. It took me a few minutes to even notice I was crying. I reached for my ghost-self and found it deep in my bones, but the effort awoke a new phantom pain that made me sob even more.

Afterwards I tried to pretended your little experiment had succeeded. If you knew my dream-self lived, you’d try again. I told you how much better I felt and tortured my grimaces into smiles and wished I wasn’t such a coward.

Maybe if we’d been strangers, I’d have stood a chance at convincing you.

* * *

I watched the sunrise from the shrine roof. The wind had increased over the course of the night; it was nearly a gale now. Landfall would be dangerous, but you were stubborn. You wouldn’t be easily scared away.

Then I thought of the ship and for a moment all their faces came back to me: the captain, the mates and deckhands, the navigator, the cook, you.

Sometimes I longed to tell someone—anyone—how the wind ran through the ferns here, how firelight enchanted the ruins at dusk, how the lichen grew in so many colours on the stone walls of my hut. I wanted to describe the starkness and beauty and melancholy of my refuge. But I couldn’t, even in my daydreams, without this vague imagined person I spoke to morphing into you. Once that happened I had to fill my mind with thoughts of anything, anything, anything else.

I sighed, shaded my eyes and studied the horizon. It was unbroken save the shadow of a wandering mainland in the north. I watched it for a long time, but could distinguish no movement.

* * *

Sometime later, you told me about the ship.

It was yours, you said. Your parents had feared your succession of failed experiments on me would drag you into a slump, and so—in a heavy-handed and somewhat random gesture of encouragement—they’d bought you a small vessel and hired a crew to sail it. You planned to pause your work for a few months, go on a journey, explore unknown lands and take home samples of their flora and fauna.

‘Who knows, I might even stumble on the breakthrough we need,’ you said. ‘All life is connected, after all. Don’t lose heart. You should come with me, Tis. The sea air will do you good.’

I almost refused. I’m sure I wanted to refuse by then, if only to be far away from you for a while. But you were so insistent, so persuasive it made me sick to my stomach.

And perhaps I wanted to see more of the world.

Or perhaps a part of me believed, despite everything, that you could still mould me into adult I used to dream of being—the explorer, unflappable and stoic and forever curious with a pair of goggles jauntily askew on my hat. I wasn’t even sure where your dreams ended and mine began any more, but the idea held a certain painful allure all the same. You wanted to purge me of my weakness and I felt so very weak.

Or perhaps I was just afraid to find out what you’d do if I refused.

But oh, wild heavens, I hoped not. That seemed the weakest, most irredeemable reason of them all.

* * *

A day passed, then a night. The sea—like the still-rising wind—grew utterly inhospitable. Waves crashed and broke against the old shipwrecks that pockmarked the cliffs.

It was as if the island itself was trying to protect me.

I loved to imagine the old myths were true. Legend had it all lands were enormous beasts with a stone hearts, brooks and streamlets for veins. When they wandered through the ocean they were migrating like birds, and their occasional twitching quakes were the rise and fall of unfathomably huge lungs, deep below the surface. This particular island was meant to jealously guard its chosen inhabitants, wasn’t it?

I tried to find comfort in the thought, but that evening, as I fluffed my feathers and tried to sleep, I had a vision of your ship dashed to pieces against the cliff side—screams and splintered wood and blood and bones.

I didn’t want that. I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t. I was so unsettled I sprinted down to the northern shore, the damp grass whistling as it parted to let me through. The world was painted in starlight and shadow. There was no shipwreck. There was nothing out of place. Dark waves lunged at the pebble beach.

I shuddered.

It had only been a waking dream.

* * *

There was much about seafaring I didn’t understand, but our navigator was happy to answer my questions.

Their name was Keye, and I quickly grew to like them. They had long grey hair and a sheepish sort of smile that belied the depth of their knowledge. Every wall of their cabin was covered in maps and charts and diagrams. Their fingertips were forever stained with ink. They told me about the movement of continents, the infamy of certain currents, the usefulness of navigating by constellations and the deadly fact even they weren’t always to be trusted, as stretches of the ocean were portals to other worlds with alien stars.

They loved telling stories from their past voyages, too, but they grew oddly guarded when I asked if they’d ever met someone like me.

‘No. I’ve only heard folktales.’

One night, I overheard you and Keye talking in the scullery. It was late. I’d risen in search of a drink of water, but now I stood frozen behind the door. I listened to your voices float from the other side. Both of you were hushed, urgent and angry. I couldn’t make out much of what was said, but my name was thrown around plenty.

I’d almost given up on trying to eavesdrop when Keye raised their voice:

‘Fine,’ they said, ‘I’ll keep my word for now, but I don’t like it. Tis deserves at least to know. Good night, Craw.’

‘Good night, Keye,’ you said.

Your voice was so terribly cold.

* * *

Your sails emerged in the distance. I looked out over the water and wondered who you’d become after all these years apart—what you’d inherited, what you’d abandoned, what composed your life now.

There! A gleam of light. The sun was caught in your spyglass lens.

I hunched bird-shaped in the grass straggling over the pebble beach. I was camouflaged, I was motionless, and I tried to reassure myself there was no way you could see me.

* * *

We stopped for supplies in a seaside village where our language was spoken, but many of the customs and idioms were foreign to us. Our place of rest was an old mage’s inn, and we decided to stay for three nights.

The inn fascinated me. There were bundles of dried herbs hanging from the rafters. Stained glass bottles filled with writhing lights decorated every window sill. The walls sported scrolls in a runic language I didn’t know, and I couldn’t quite shake the impression that their ink glowed scarlet in my peripheral vision, but when I turned my head, it faded at once to a sleepy grey. Laughter floated around the hardwood dining tables every morning as guests ate their breakfast. I wondered what it would be like to really live there.

When I met the mage’s ward, my heart almost stopped.

She was taller than me, and perhaps a few years older. She had wispy hair and bright, melancholy eyes.

And she was like me. I knew at once. There was a light in her spirit and a hollow lightness to her bones that some second-sight within me recognised, clear as day.

She had a bird’s soul.

I searched for the courage to ask her about it, but in the end, I didn’t need to. She found me on the last night of our stay. I was sitting on the porch with my back to the brickwork, hugging my knees and crying. It was very late—so late it might have been better to say it was very early in the morning—and the sky was black with cloud. The smell of rain had seeped into the still night air. Lanterns hung at intervals from the awning—cast iron claws cradling unnatural flames. They illuminated the shrubs and leaves and flowers in the old mage’s garden. The night air was cool against my teary face.

‘Are you... alright?’ she said.

I nodded. ‘I often get like this. I’m okay.’

She frowned. ‘Be careful out there.’

She sat down in one of two lichen-covered rocking chairs, and after a moment’s hesitation, I rose and took the other one. We stared out into the dark.

I thought of a handful of things I could say, but somehow all of them were about you—how you scared me, how you promised to save me, how I feared that accepting I didn’t want your salvation would leave me with nothing in the wide world.

‘I’ll try,’ I said, at last.

She looked at me. ‘Do you really mean that? Really? Will do what’s needful to save your heart, or will you offer it up on a platter for others to eat?’

‘What do you mean?’ I knew.

She shot me a look, half tender and half angry. ‘Your heart is precious. You need to be its guardian, or all is lost.’

Fresh tears came. ‘I’ll try. I swear. I’ll really try.’

‘Good.’

I didn’t want silence to claim us, nor I didn’t want to talk for long about my own sorrows, so I tried to frame a question: ‘What about you? Are you...?’

She flashed me a wild grin. ‘I’m well. I’m paying off an old debt. Someone gave me the same advice a long time ago, when I was trapped in the dark.’

I smiled too. Somehow this emboldened me more than anything else she’d said. She’d broken free of whatever had stalked her. Somehow, someday, maybe I could break free too.

We talked through the darkest hour and into the grey light of dawn. Then she stood. She touched my shoulder.

‘Please don’t forget. Good luck, Tis.’

And in a shifting, impossible rush, she transformed into a hawk, took wing and soared into the grey sky.

* * *

I stood there, just above the pebble beach, the chill of the wind in my feathers. I watched you drop into your little dinghy. I watched you plunge your paddle into the water. I watched you curse into the spray as the tides rejected you.

‘Tis!’ you cried. ‘Can you hear me? I’m going to find you, okay? I’m taking you home!’

Didyou know what I thought of you? I’d wondered and wondered and wondered to no avail. Did I know? What did I feel, seeing your face after so long—the face I’d loved a lifetime ago?

Something cold squeezed my heart.

I’m not ashamed to say I prayed you’d never reach land.

* * *

Our ship docked at a sprawling coastal port where few knew our language. It lay in Keye’s homeland, so we planned to rely on them as our interpreter. They chatted about the country’s customs and beliefs as we approached the docks, as we dropped anchor, as we loaded our things into longboats and ferried them over to dry land. I loved listening to Keye, but I there was something odd in their voice today—something watchful and strained underneath their smile. Now and then they shot you a long look, and your eyes grew stony, and I felt like some vital, incomprehensible communication flickered through the air between the two of you.

I was just hauling my own pack up out of a longboat when I saw a silhouette on the horizon. Suddenly everything else fell out of focus. It was surely just an island, but my wounded dream-self cried out the moment I laid eyes on it. I knew not why or how, but it mattered.

‘Keye?’ I said, my eyes searching for them even as I spoke. They were standing on the dock, not too far away. I shouldered my pack and ran over.

‘Yes?’ Keye said.

I pointed out to sea. ‘What’s that?’

A few expressions crossed their face too fast for me to really decipher—was that uncertainty I saw? Guilt? Dread?

‘It’s a wandering island,’ they said, after a moment’s pause. ‘It hardly ever visits this land. I... bet it’ll be gone by dawn. A lot of old folktales surround it. The elders here talk as if it’s a live thing. They say it only grants a few souls passage onto its shores, shipwrecks all the rest. And... to hell with it. Tis, listen to me, they say those who make it are birds inside.’

‘Birds?’

‘Yes.’ they gave me a searching look. ‘That’s what I heard growing up. It’s a very, very old place.’

Then your voice came from behind me and startled me so much I jumped: ‘What are you two going on about?’

Keye stiffened.

You looked at them and the blood drained from your face. ‘Did you... did you tell Tis about...?’

Keye nodded slowly.

I’d never seen you look so angry. You shot them a murderous glare then turned and gripped my shoulders far too tight and spoke to me in a low, anxious rasp: ‘Don’t. Please. Don’t give into it. It’s not right. It’s not you.’

How do you know? I wanted to ask. I wished I’d never told you the contents of my dreams. There was something in your eyes, a flash like the lightning heralding the thunder. I shook you off and turned to run, but I’d barely made it ten steps before your weight hit my back and we both collapsed onto the ground. My forehead bashed the cobblestones and for a moment my vision was aflame. I could process nothing save a ringing in my ears and the taste of blood in my mouth.

You wrapped your arms around me, pinning me down, holding me there.

‘Please,’ you hissed. ‘You can’t leave me. You can’t give up. I’m going to save you.’

There was no wind in my lungs to breathe, let alone reply.

Then Keye was in the fray, and in a blur of limbs and pain and bloody teeth, and I was free, and I was scrambling to my feet, my ghostly feathers enshrouding me, my mind clear and hollow, my grief liquid in my veins.

Keye’s lips shaped the word ‘run’.

And I ran.

I took my pack and fled the docks. I ran into the winding city streets, and I didn’t turn back, even as your voice shrieked after me like all the wind on this earth. Once I’d lost you, I circled back and made for the far end of the harbour. The sun had sunken low to the hills. Darkness was falling.

After a lot of confused gesturing to a woman I’d likely never see again, I managed to hire a wooden row boat. I was crying as I handed her my coins; they weren’t of this land, but she accepted them anyway. The boat rocked underfoot as I climbed in. She passed me the oars.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

She said something I couldn’t understand, concern plain on her face.

I smiled through my tears. ‘It’s okay. I’m okay. I promise.’

I took my oars in my hands and made for the island. I could have sworn it was calling to me. Once I reached it I’d be made whole at last.

Someday, I thought, I’d return and search for others like me. We’d hold hands and share stories and find joy in our strangeness. We’d cherish our hollow-boned dreams. We’d haunt each other, and love each other, and everything would be alright.

But for now I needed to leave it all behind. I needed time to heal.

I needed to become reacquainted with my heart.

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[Content warning for abusive friendship, othering, medical pathologisation/abuse, vague allusion to colonialism, poisoning, emotional breakdowns, depictions of violence/injury (including assault, allusions to fatal shipwrecks and a semi-figurative description of an injured bird).