#whale fall

planar whale fall

She has been dead for a very short time now. The water getting colder still. Colder than all the snow that’s ever kissed her, she can feel it pooling in her lungs. Her stomach. Heavy. Has her chest ever felt this weak? She can’t recall, she fears. She is not the mind that quietly dissolved in waves, ruptured from her belly and turned off the lights before it left. She is the flesh it loved. She is the body that loved it back to the point of life. To the point of submission and growth. To life. And now, she is becoming something new, something she’s never been before. Or something she was her entire life, perhaps. It’s hard to say. She’s been falling into the sky for such a long time now. It gets colder and heavier. Darker. Can she still say she’s scared? That this cold is so dark that even though she’s already dead, she’s so, so scared? The heart that moved an ocean of blood is so hauntingly quiet. The mind that loved her enough to speak to her, to share with her in their secret tongues of salt and prayer and lightning, has now turned her in its passing into a dark and lonely church. She’s alone, and scared, and falling. There is no light here. There is no light because for whatever light there may be, she is too dead to see it.

But she feels a presence.

She remembers the smell of rain. The peace of snow upon her back. How, when the sky bore a fleeting tooth, it spoke her song in a voice she didn’t know a creature could speak. She has worn the rainbow silks that flood the northern skies as her blanket. She knows what stars taste like. And now, within this endless midnight, she knows her eyes have become the pale moon she worshipped. The pull that called her back from the deep black sky when she’d dive too far. The eye of the whale that drags the oceans with her slow, blinking gaze. Is that what she now becomes? Is the moon dead too? If there’s any magic in her bones, she begs the god below. Tell me, O Gaping Throat of Blackest Songs, O Starving God who yearns for the moon to fall below your soft baleen that swallowed the lower stars, O Mother of Monsters Betwixt Her Shadow-Drowned Teeth, is this what gods are? Are you dead things that blessed a barren world? Was life born from the corpse’s womb and the carrion’s love? She doesn’t know if she wants to become that. She’s scared of how it will hurt to be so loved by the living and their teeth. Yet through death’s veil, she can hear a lullaby robed in starlight, sung like gentle, arctic rime.

Who are you?

And then, landfall. The beach at the bottom of world. That there is sand here should be no surprise, but the irony that somehow, even here, her end is on a beach, almost hurts a little. She couldn’t have known how soft it would feel against riven flesh. It’s too quiet here. The silence as heavy as the water and the water fills her in places that never knew its icy touch, only its succour. Lips press against her skin and prayers are whispered in the water by creatures who slither with a breath like Eden’s apple. “What am I?” She asks the mouths in the abyss. “What am I to you all?” They respond, as one, “Mercy. You are mercy. Hallelujah.” And then teeth. She is too dead to feel any pain. A mercy. Without that deafening pain she feels prayers in her flesh she’d never known were spoken when the living eat. It’s warm. It calms her. As her bones begin to meet the water, her blood becomes her tears. Calmly, she weeps. Calmly, they drink and she becomes. There’s so much hunger in the dark. So much joy and darkness and holy communion. She doesn’t feel like a god. The more they eat, the more life she becomes, and yet, that presence still grows closer. The lullaby becoming clearer. The song that tells her what she’s become. A holiness, a haunting.

A ghost you can still devour.

“I found you, my love,” the voice whispers, and when she hears her with ears that cannot hear, and see her with eyes that cannot see, she knows her, in bones that should not feel. She knows her and she is Death. The fish with hollow socket eyes. She thought she was grand but gods how she is so, terribly vast. She touches her and not one creature more, with a grace impossible and a fin with tendrils of bone beyond comprehension. The dead feast looks at her and nothing else can pierce the veil. Her scales are woven with starlight and her fins flow like silk. She looks at Death and from her song she knows things she couldn’t possibly know. Hands. She touches her with her hands. A lantern hangs above her brow. Beautiful. Her teeth are sharp and gentle as her lips. She is not alone now, and though she is still scared, she does not know if she is scared of this presence. She is a mermaid. A Siren-Witch. A fae shaped by man, but so much older than the stories that touched her. She is Death. She will come for their stories too. “But for now,” she tells the sweetly dead. “I am here for you.” And she cups her in her hands. She holds her to her chest. The rot, the blood, the story, it spills and weeps from her and still she holds on as tender as a lover. Her lips are softer than water and it doesn’t hurt when she sinks in her teeth. She only feels the cold, tender love.

“I love you,” she whispers.

And she is loved. She has no song and she is loved. She is dead, and yet she is loved. She was a lonely daughter of the sea who lived and loved and sang as she touched the sky. She’s fallen deeper now than she’s ever fallen before and fed such tiny mouths she never knew could speak. “I will always love you,” she says, and kisses her again with teeth. The weeping blood feels endless and emptied. She holds her so, terribly, close in the dark. The cold. They lie upon the sand and creatures rest within the hollowed arches. She is devoured and she is loved. She is changed and she is loved. She is dead and she is loved. Death does not wish to love the dead woman as she was before. She does not try to bring her back or fix this death within the flesh. The tattered whale weeps for what she’s lost and what she’s become, she weeps for what she fears and what she’ll never know and never once does she stop being held with love. Teeth touch her heart through her bones and the lullaby hums like whalesong. They stay together in this grief, a long, long time. Long enough for flowers now to fill the bones. Her soul is fled, her flesh is cleaned and her blood is wept. But she is still here. And she is so very, very tired. The sleep is what she feared the most. But she thinks now, held and loved as she is, she will sleep in peace and welcome what mourning waits beyond the veil. A Death as kind as you, she knows, will keep her safe.