Should I grieve my lost seasons?
Or the loss of a newfound reverence
For the power of ancient bones?
Strip him of all, demanded the weak
Who cannot fathom strength so deep
It can never be stripped by lies.
Should I mourn what was stripped?
Tendon scraped from a length of bone.

I soldiered but was never a good soldier,
To believe what others tell me I should
"As you say," I might say, nevertheless.
So no matter what I 'should' grieve,

This is all I regret.

You who know that my poems fail to rhyme
Only when I grieve too deeply, know of what I speak:
The magic of the Night Tiger's pelt
In another daughter's hands.
Though now on it I will speak no more
For you are one I believe
Truly strived for the wood's empowerment,
Rather than primarily your own legend.

And the other of whom this I truly believe,
And thus will not speak of save
few words, for you never loved words.
Catapults. Jousting. You hibernate. I miss you most.
And I betrayed you most.
You never betrayed me.

That is all.
And that is all I regret.

What strikes me with regretless grief,
Are those whose kinship I imagined.

Lie down, you said. After bidding I would be under the table in chains again.
But I recall your thoughts on strawberry ice milk,
Your fondness for cherries.
How we sat on the rocks in the salt spray following my awful gift of a truffle.
Lemonade, when an elk hide tent
Was the only shelter between the sun
And the burning sand of the Mhojavian canyon.

How the song of the sands will whisper
In your voice. What I will hear
When I listen to the rain. The hymn
I sang and we sang together and for minutes
I thought maybe I could sing again
Instead of humming the Helban goatherd's call.

A doe is soft and a knife is hard.
Liquid eyes and a blade in your back.
We wrote poetry often at once but I doubt
You will answer me this time.
Or will you? Levy hypocritical blame,
Cast to southern Manu and scorn me
For placing my back to a vampire
On a field no one else joins.
I never truly knew you, and could not predict you,
For you were not be known. Even if I saw the chamber of wombs.
(too many wombs)
You twist, you change, you do not remember.
As fleeting as the wind you bound away and return unknown.

Bitterness tempers my remembrance.
Of the throttling lotion of a savaged archer,
Your sister's fermented milk when
We partied in honor of Kaarn.
(always hurling the cups after chugging)
The prayer I spoke over your son.
(knowing the broken knuckles of another)

I tried to save you from interrogation,
Even when I could not move. You came
When I shouted atop the Tower of Hope.
Your axe between my shoulders like the pat of a friend.
Strange how time opens and closes a book.

Repeat, repeat, I grieve kinship imagined,
For it was in my warped imagining alone as kinship true --
Like a knight's service to his king, imagined the same --
When outside my skull it reigned as chains
Leashing a dog who did not know how to heel
Who would not be a dog, even if he knew.

A dog who placed himself my model:
Do you remember how I asked if it hurt
That they called you 'Hound', and you had such a way
Of replying so that I was shamed to have even asked?

You held the chrysanthemum gently
You spoke to me of the restraint that must accompany power.
Vast thought spent on flowers for my helm.
And I still love the magnolias for it.
Your furrow in dark earth under tall oaks,
When the baker's daughter died,
And we both had tears in our eyes
(now you have no eyes).
Your forehead against mine.
Your heartbeat in my ear.
Your words,
Of Her voice,
Keeping me alive through despair,
And then --

Past the Komlat and my grave in compost.
Past tossed, fang-caught nuts at Kalavar's mural.
Past a simple, thoughtless laugh between two soldiers.
Past an embrace and a book to you heartfelt dedicated.
Past everything I was, that I strove to be, that you
(only you, only you)
Past you who understood.

Your words.
Pulling me down into the dark.
'Nothing left of him but a monster.'
Something to crush.
Not a chrysanthemum.

Between then and then, I know now what it was that I did.
Why you loved a confused fool tumbled from the Halls, unraveled
But could not love me once the threads became a tapestry.
I know.

Yet, despite knowing, I remained a fool for too long
(too long, whispered the wood, too long, too long).
For I imagined bonds of kinship that were more than mere chains,
And even as chains were hauled, time and again,
I forgave the push and the pull.
I imagined a kinship that did not exist.
That loss is what I grieve.

I know, I mourn for a corpse
So long past decay that many wonder why
I could imagine it still lived.
A skeleton. I carve bone in a forest where a cabin
Stands that smells like you, but it is empty.

Clarity cuts deeply. Wounds bleed.
And even deeper than new kin cut the old,
The oldest and closest friend I still kept.
Did I imagine then? Who knows, but I imagined now.

The one to whom I called when overwhelmed
By memory, by nightmare, or by vampires
Who piled upon me in the Dominion's halls,
You I trusted to save me from others and myself
Even when I had not the breath to speak your full name.

I ate mushrooms and sat on a barrel in the Silverdrop.
You were so angry even through your love for a foolish commander.
Your tread in the straw that covered the floor
Of a jail cell, in Enorian, heavy and hung over.
Your quiet when Exzuryx demanded
That I step down or face war against three nations.
Drinking absinthe under Rust on Copper's sign.
Jesting with Sir Raum at Four Corners.
Your shop was in the northwest corner of the north side of the bazaar.
The things you would carve, so thoughtfully savage, so wildly sweet.
You were the only one who cared when Rayne left.

But you changed.
Friendship is something you look on as a stranger now.
A thing you have stripped away.
Pretense, to be used as a tool.
Yet for too long
(too long, too long, too long)
I still pretended, to myself, that it was not gone.

The lash of your tail. The scythe of your words.
Thunder above Salma.
You told me never to drop my dhurive.
How my heart beat red when you tore me apart.
The color of your gaze every season.

Like the sky when the clouds
Are high and wisping white.
Like the sun when it is eclipsed,
Or embers banked in a hearth at night.
Like the gloaming mist inside a coffin, like the lightning
Blindness of what struck me when you took me to the basin,
When you said, "Auspicious."
Like the stitching on a child's toy.
Like nothing. Like nothing.
Like a hailstorm of arrowheads into my soul.

A grocery list for raw fish
Your feral grin behind the waterfall
A rough clasp over the wand in your fist,
In the quiet of your witch's barrow,
With Her fierce fury shared through sharp smiles.

The way you sat on the arm of the chair
Beside me while I read 'The Jackals of Tilltonas' for the first time,
In that attic that was too small
For anyone other than your children,
Where they had played, and there we sat,
And you did not understand why I wept.

Why linger on the pain of what you did to me?
To excise that pain, then, I write:
You were a shadow before Rhulvok's totem.
A shadow at the Man-Drum -- once, and again.
The blade of your regard -- once, and again, and on and on
Until its edge was blunted. Cursed.
I cannot remember how many times I was cursed.
Made to stagger while you threw athames and sang.
Vomiting, and falling in water I could not see.
Claws in my side, then perplexed by the red haze.
You drew a flower on my arm, ever confused by my stupid fallibility.
Thairet. Thairet. Thairet, always.
Your wife laughed when I cried on the Moonglade's shore.
Self-pitying fool, you would say, but
You never understood how I was not sad, but afraid.
I cared about your strife but you abandoned
Me to mine.
You sat on the fences others built out of cowardice.
Taught me I was only suited for soldiering, but not kin;
Fodder to be trampled on the field when he stumbles.

A field only to be fought upon
When convenient.
And easy.
Easier still are threats upon a child and her fragile mother.
Fighting not the way one fights a foe with honor,
But in a swarm against one roach,
Or a forestal fighting alongside a forest,
Seeking ease rather than what is right,
Hungry only for the weak.

But time will pass.

Someday I will come upon a robin's nest
And not think of your eyes
(behind elderflower petals drifting from your antlers)
Amongst the broken detritus of empty shells.


O Fornax witness me speak true!
As you witnessed mirrorshards mend but not for Death's King to take the throne!
Eggshells break for what comes to be born.
And this world must break
For justice to be wrought.

Let sorrow be spent, let me
Soldier on.
Skilled at soldiering or not,
Wanted by anyone or not,
Let me face this lack of ease
And grow strong.

Let me forget grief.
Tighten at my throat, chain,
Tighten, chain of the God of Graven Grief,
Tighten for lost love and betrayal,
For breakings of the past and breakings of the future.
Tighten until the taste of the dryad's blood
Is no longer a lump in my throat.

Poison turns bone green and becomes a knife to carve the world.
But I hold the hollow-edged blade of a forbidden friend,
Who carved a sitara from Revolution's frame.
With death-edged clarity I witness how trial brings forth truth,
How kinship can breathe still across lines of enmity,
And although I witness, too, how false kinship does not --
Let pettiness be scraped away, and only truth remain.

What falls away into the snow, I will forget.


Penned by my hand on Falsday, the 13th of Ios, in the year 19 AC.