who we are and all that we're trying to be
The Sword had asked the Shield earlier that day, a catalyst, an impetus, what it was like to fly.
She’d said freedom.
But as he was released, massive form hurtling through time and space, it didn’t bear the same weight as liberation or deliverance. It coiled in his gut on a silent, feral scream, the air rushed out of his lungs as he sank like a stone through ether and clouds, through darkness and stars, no one to see him down below until he’d crashed into the ground, until he’d left an imprint of his massacred, decrepit body in the fields.
He thought about closing his eyes, about not seeing buildings come into view before his death; but then that would be cowardly too.
And then he wasn’t alone.
The ghosts ran rampant along his senses, curling and coiling beside his figure, as fleeting as they’d been in life, as he struggled to breathe, as he thought about reaching for some of them. There were thunderous whispers and crackling schisms across the void, gods of time and spark, sneering, derisive, shaking its head as if he’d never amount to anything, had known all along. He could see the canvases, the faces, of those he’d crushed in battle and left to die, contorted spears left in their chests, forms shoved off the sides of mountains when he couldn’t be bothered to do anything else, plotting reverberations echoing across his frame, Psyche’s tossed crown looming at his feet, a thousand other moments buried, come to hollow and carve him out as he fell.
Monumental too, were his favored phantoms: fire tangled near his ear and yelled, a familiar, broken sound: fly. Water distorted somewhere along the wind and ordered: fly. There was rain tethered in his hair, on his hands, on his fingers, gentle and imploring, begging: fly.
Another anthem on his lips, hushed and irreverent. Fly, fly, fly.
Puddles, images of feathers, of gilded, sienna plumage, an instant in time, a formation of the future. He shook in the wind, billowing, as if he were nothing, just one more flickering ember about to go out.
Deimos managed to extend his arms, on a whim, on capriciousness, on mercurial parameters because if he was going to die, he might as well have tried, looking into himself, himself, himself.
Then they were on the tips of his fingers, wild and pinioned, rapacious and coiling, following the lines of shoulders, torso, and legs, vision shifting, the unknown beckoning: wings shaping his accord. On instinct and naught else, he twisted and turned, flapping, gliding, hovering, rising in the wind instead of plummeting through it.
It takes dying to know
How to live as ghosts
