Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

     Death cometh not when called, and leveth not when asked to. It is a bad friend, a poor companion, and for those who would be into that, it is an unpleasant lover too. Past the thrill of its closeness, its touch, most of the time, is cold and flickering, as if shy or uncertain, which was rich coming from Death; its fingers, most of the time, are long, dry and boney; its nails brittle, misshapen and friable; its breath heavy and rancid, its skin fly-eaten.

Death follows — less of a wicked thing than a wayward wind, a not-stubborn, but persistent fellow. One like Dankovsky bows not to its obstinacy, to its hauntings like phosphorous clouds, strewn ghosts through the cracks of valleysides, to its wave of spruce treetops clinging to the sills of windows, to the corner of eyes. One like him moves not from its path. Wild hart eyes upon the other, they wait for the first step into the antler-locked battle. Horns entwine in unshakable bushes of thorns in each other's side — one like him kneels not to Death, not to anyone, anything else. White-bone top-of-head perched upon its shaggy black cloak, Death breathes into Thanatica — Thanatica into life. Black-ink top-of-hair balancing upon the column of his neck, clad down to his shins of a white coat, Dankovsky wrestles Death to the ground like a Laokoôn whose hands would have managed to crush the throats of Athena’s/Poseidon’s/Apollon’s snakes — or at least kept them away, just for long enough. He wasn’t about to fight three gods at once, though, through story—through story—through story—stirred made and remade to the needs and wants of worship; he was to fight something both infinitely more pragmatic and infinitely more ineluctable. He was to be Laokoôn’s snakes, self-ordained where they were divinely so, to loop himself twice around Death’s ribcage, and to tighten around it the noose of him. He was to be pragmatic and ineluctable. 

.❊.

     Herald goes after herald, message-bearer after messenger. His train had stopped in an isolated station nestled in a mountain pass, huddled like a wooden fledgling in the cup of a wide green nest. It was not starting again, and the cars were bleeding out passengers onto the platform and the sides of the tracks. The Bachelor hailed someone outside, the first person who seemed affiliated with the running of that steam-powered caravan. 

“You, young man! Why are we stopped? More importantly — why are we stuck?”
“Can’t keep going,” his interlocutor replied, “the rail’s fucked.”
“Pardon?”
“Railway’s FUCKED, good sir,” he repeated, louder, with more teeth showing. “We can’t keep going.”
“How in fate’s name am I to reach out east, then?” the Bachelor hissed tautly. 
“Not my problem, good sir. Hail a horseman, see if he helps.”

The man had not been aggressive; it had not been irritation or anger that marred his face. Agitation and jitters had pulsated across his features, through his lips that trembled as he had spoken, his eyes that had twitched. 
As far as heralds went, how was this for an omen? Somewhere, out there, the tracks were sullied of something dreadful and sinister. Or, as the man had put it, “fucked”. 
Dankovsky was not the superstitious kind — but he was well-read, well-read enough to recognize presages when they presented themselves. He had nothing to offer whichever god it could be that barred his way, and no desire to bend the knee to it. He was about to meet more powerful — so, onwards, and see for the sacrifices later. 
No bending, no bowing, no battering the doom-drum — yet. Onward he went, then, on and forth, head strong, headstrong, against the heady winds that batted their bells and knocked their whistling chimes against his forehead, noisy as a king’s cortege.

     So he’d walked. In another life, in another story, he had run the course of the sun to bring news of a distant victory; in this one, he walked east, into night, into mystery. His heart swelled with anticipation, his breathing sharpened. His lungs hurt as he struggled to find his pace. The plain under his thin-soled shoes was hard with rounded buboes-stones, then suddenly so soft he almost walked right through. His pace slowed, then quickened again; his calves stretched and each step fanned the flames of pain. A cramp of the gastrocnemius, the soleus; a sudden ache of the Achilles’ tendon. He felt the rubbing of the edge of his shoe at the back of his ankle, then, when he adjusted his stance, at the side. Laces undone. Laces wet. Then, a sock too. As a hill rolled down into another, he picked up speed, and his feet kept slamming into the depths of the toecaps. When he slowed to get over an incline, a dull ache would begin growing at his hip joint. When he hurried pace down a slope, each step rang pain in his knees. He crouched and walked folded like a secretive book. He straightened, because his lungs hurt. He switched bag-carrying arm over, and over, and over again, each time quicker as shoulder and elbow-hinge pain woke up sooner. Eventually, a shape tore through the distance, cloaked in atmospheric greyblue, hazy at its borders like it was trying to bleed through. Tall, sharp, towering, tearing a mellowed, foggy hole through the horizon. A Giant, whose top of head scraped the underbelly of the sky like Mount Olympius did the clouds over the Aliakmon. He began running. 

.❊.

     It walked by him. It must have sat by him on the train, then it must have walked by him through the steppe, on faster legs as he slithered. It must have, black horse of bone and rot, ambled and trotted by his side and entered the city galloping, triumphant, conquerant through the gates, and of its blade torn through the family Dankovsky was to meet. 
No—no. It is not about triumph, or about conquest. Remember, Bachelor — it is pragmatic and ineluctable. And today, today alone, today again, it was faster than you. You follow it; it does not follow you. 

And follow it he did. The people spoke a lot, in this town — those in power spoke a lot to say little, but that little was important. In these black currents of veiled threats and denunciations, the Bachelor kept finding needles and hagstones. The needles pointed to a killer like accusatory fingers.
Was the first man not enough? Now Isidor was dead too. The Bachelor’s correspondent, a selfless man, a savant whose words were just opaque enough to fan the flames of the Bachelor’s unending and restless pursuing spirit, was murdered. Off-stage, there, hidden, behind the curtains, in the muffled and dull world of the back-stage, where anything could happen, and could have happened. Who was it, the damned devil who dared raise hand and strike of it at least one man, maybe two one after the other, or at once? What gives? What gun? What bullet, gullet, strangulation? What motive? — it couldn’t have been because they hid, or lied, or stood out so extraordinarily; and if it was, how hypocritical had it been to choose them amongst so many. Bah! Onwards, then! 
He went out, nose in the wind, on a trail, any trail. Met a sane person — was not even hoping anymore! A mathematician, a philologist, a woman who stood straight, white and dry like a limestone cliff, leaning on her cane as if pushed by a wind only she was battling. She was thinking a lot, and continuously, and it must’ve heated her forehead up, for she kept running a hand in her short hair to push her bangs back. She smelled of smoke, wore a deep dark green men’s waistcoat she had obviously tailored herself — not well, the stitches were visible at the hems; her fingers bore tiny pricking marks and, one of those, an obvious writer’s callus. Kindred! Dankovsky thought with an internal sigh of relief. She was well-spoken and sensed. She might have been one of those Sapphists, which was none of his business. She was well-read, he found, from the few envious glances he had thrown at her shelves. Amongst her books, he spotted Renée Vivien’s translations of Sappho’s works, and considered his previous interrogation answered. Thank you, Lyuricheva, nurse your twyre headaches, if you please, and for the love of fate, whose mysteries you seem to be initiated to even if you weep, Lyuricheva, keep your head on your shoulders, keep it screwed tight, do not let it hang off the hinges of your nape like a door neither open nor close, do not let panic or cowardice or madness or whatever else slither through. In the meantime, the hunt went on. He was Bachelor and no detective, but he prided himself on having a keen nose. 

     Evidently, not keen enough. 
Did the smell of Lyuricheva’s cigarettes throw him off his trail? In his defense, sickness didn’t stink quite the same as blood-soak on killer’s skin did. And a foreign illness, whose stench he was not used to, didn’t agitate his nose the same as those he was formally acquainted with. 
But still it did, oh, bitterly so. This one, this new one, dull and bleak, with lingerings of sulfur and rot like a steady pulse, was pricked of openings through which gushed the astringency of yarrow, of too-green of cloves, of vinegar. It irritated the skin and the mucous membranes. It stung and punctured. In Isidor’s cavern-black, putrid-walled fortress for a house, the stench permeated the walls like that of dense smoke. It felt dense as smoke, thick as fog, the Bachelor found himself struggling to wade through. This creeped him out enough. It creeped him out more when the smell sweetened, languished itself flat and honeyed like that of petitgrain, sage or tarragon. 
The Bachelor ran to the door, closed it after him, and even then the smell lingered. He needed that house locked. He needed it locked in. The closest throne was the Saburov’s, right back there, and trekking to it felt like swimming against the currents. He needed lock, key, he needed key hidden or buried. He needed, what, a red cross, “a foot long in the middle of the door”, now did he?
He’d take the lock and the key to the house, he’d take the key away from the house, he’d take Saburov’s so-careful (or was it?) presumption from throne to throne, just close the rest, and throw away—no, do not throw away, give the key to the Bachelor, who started feeling like the only sane one around. Oh, and bodies by the train tracks, now. Sick too, then? Tried to escape? Did they know about the disease? No, no; stab wounds, evident. One had been stabbed in the leg, artery grossly gone through. Wounds on his side indicated it was probably a brawl, and he grabbed, and he was grabbed. Ah! Well that didn’t help the Bachelor’s inquiry, did it. Had word of the disease spread already? Had people already gone mad, they who did not have any responsibility for now, and soon would only have those to stay indoors, obey orders and ration their food carefully? 
Oh — yes, the people had. They had already found who to designate as their scapegoat, their witch. 
Jesus Christ, Dankovsky thought as he retched, as his eyes stung with the bitterness of the smoke. Poor girl, poor girl who must’ve been some five odd years younger than him. Jesus Christ… He had to quell this madness before it took hold — it was not that hard to not murder in mindless fear, with nothing but superstition as accusations against the innocent, not that hard to shelter in place and weather the storm, goddamnit!

Even with the brand of illness scarring bodies, for now, and only for now, two of them, and at least one house, its stench burrowing itself into the walls and from the burrows sprouting red, the Bachelor’s unlikely associate — Rubin, this man tall and dry, hollowed under the eyes with a nervous twitch in one of them, pale with fatigue and black-eyed as an aspen tree — only half-believed the men had been killed by an illness. When asked, he said he couldn’t shake the feeling of the murderer having a human form. Dankovsky grimaced — he’d heard of the she-harbinger who from the depths of earth came, or whatever—what, no? not her? Who, then? Rubin barked out something about a man having come by train, a man he knew. Still, the half of him who believed in illness believed it to the marrow. He spoke of it with terror — still, he didn’t flinch. Stand tall, for god’s sake, Dankovsky wanted to shake him into reason, I can’t be the only one with his head on his shoulders in this whole town. So many others have it shoved in the ground — god knows what they’re seeing down there — he’d heard such unbelievable things coming from all sides. Surrounded, cornered by madness. And, Bachelor, it hadn’t even started.  

.❊.

     At the very least, Dankovsky told himself, he had a roof over his head, and the room lended to him was big enough that he could pace comfortably, oh, it even had a desk too, and a tiny bathroom tucked behind a thin wall, its outer one concave, pushing out into the night outside two small oculi pierced into the facade to observe the plot of land that flanked it. It would have been really annoying to furnish such a room, Dankovsky thought, with normal pieces, but most of them, inside, were bespoke. His host, lovely as she was, looked to be drowning in such a big house, only seeming not-lost because her strides in it were determined and steady. 
Strange building it was, nonetheless. From outside, it didn’t look too out of the ordinary, well, except for the atlantes who held up the cornice over the front door, probably; besides on the cathedral, not many of those were around. Inside, though, the air felt thick and heavy as a beast’s pelt, a crimson fleece that no basilisk guarded. This was in no small part due to the tapestries hanged over the windows in the place of curtains; Dankovsky could not tell if they’d been there since the beginning or if this was one of miss Yan’s fantasies. The cornices that ran at the very top of the wall were carved of a dent in their lengths; in the low light, that funnel appeared filled with shadow like a gutter with black water. Flickering candlelight made the shadows of the modillions underlining them shudder and move, as if whispering between themselves. 

The upstairs didn’t look too ordinary either. The stairs to climb up were taut, sharp, dangerous. They felt concave under the foot, which gave a terrible impression of slipping through the wood at every step, each of which creaked powerfully. The walls, too, felt to tighten on the way up, the threshold to the attic this nervous bottleneck, from which one extirpated himself with sweat on the brow. 
The open mouth of the fireplace, close to the door, was perfectly cold, its ashes closer to dust; yet, the color on the brick betrayed a recent use, or what looked like a recent use. A frieze of dark stone, or marble, more likely, this variegated brocatelle mottled of soft reds, creams, beiges, veined of dark greys and inhabited by chunks of dull gold, ran above the fireplace. In it were carved two mascarons, whose traits seemed to move with the light, very… “Sinaitic Pantocrator”, thought Dankovsky, and he spent a few minutes, crouched in front of them, balancing from heel to heel, getting better views of the polymorphic, bicephalic stone-faces. The bronze candelabra were knotted, ornate, not unlike Corinthian capitals on thinner a column-shaft; the candles inside were well-melted, even though the place had electricity. Fanciful, Dankovsky thought. Some walls were lime-washed, others covered in a wallpaper thick, textured, very soft to the touch — which Dankovsky knew, because he’d been compelled. 

Everything looked perfectly in its place, and yet just ever-so-slightly off. Wallpaper felt to have pores. Metal of candelabra smelt like coins handled in clammy hands. There was no wind, and yet the curtains shivered, rocked with timid waves. 
Couldn’t be madder than outside, the Bachelor thought, and as he remembered the entanglement in the rulers’ power-web he’d gotten himself into, he grimaced and sighed. As he let himself flop on the bed, the slightly off-putting room felt fine, it felt just fine, it was weird in a way that was tangible, decorative, a bit bold. Having dealt with covertness, and cowardice, and plain madness, the Bachelor could only hum in relief.   

.❊.

     There couldn’t be only covertness and cowardice and madness in this town, could there? After a nap, the restfulness of which was questionable, Dankovsky went out again. He had met Lyuricheva, head-on-shoulders enough of a character. Quite unlike Eva, whose head wandered so obviously in the ether — the painted ceiling of the Stillwater’s ground floor, all Baroque of fluffy peach and pink clouds, which she saw from her bed, her vanity and her settee, couldn’t have helped. He had met Lara, whose concerns were grounded, whose feet were firmly planted on the ground, no matter how light she trod. Met the strange singer, met the meek-hearted gravekeeper. Met the thieving boy who, damn, god only knew where he could be now… Met the ruling families, each member more or less agreeable, or even listenable-to. How was this, for an ensemble cast? They stood out, they deambulated on the concave scene, they mumbled under masks, or maybe those were their real faces. Dankovsky just wanted to reach for the curtain, reach and shake it, maybe not even pull it entirely, he just wished for a glance. An insatiable curiosity had brought him here; it’d keep him here until the play was over. He’d met almost too many to keep his head straight, and he feared this was only the beginning. 
The only people missing were the two he had come to see. 

Past the Guzzle, Dankovsky went south. He roamed by the station for a minute, seeing what was left of its trains: a penning of beasts of cast iron, wood and glass, their wheels cold under them, and beasts of flesh and of bone, who roamed. No heifers in sight, no calves; not even a herdsman to be seen. Dankovsky didn’t linger by the beasts: they looked placid enough, but he had no intention of coming closer to check. 
Further east, before a long and tall, if slightly rotten, wooden palisade, a group of children buzzed and yelped, jumped in place, pointed at something on the ground. Dankovsky, nosy, stepped closer. 

“You can pick it up,” a little girl said, “let me pick it up!”
“You out of it, yeah?” reproved a boy strongly. “We’re using my bandage as the blindfold if you want to play, or I’m not playing with you anymore!”
“Why? Why can’t we use that? Blind man’s bluff lacks magic anyways, let’s do something about it!”

Dankovsky’s ear perked up. He considered himself rational, and he was — but truth percolated from the mouths of the youngest, and it was not the first time he’d heard something about “magic”. 

“You know what’s in these girls’ clothes, you must not touch it with your hands! And especially not put it over your eyes!” the boy continued on his rebuking. 
“It’s blessed!” the little girl disapproved.
“It’s cursed!” the boy rejected in turn. 
“That’s the same thing!”

Alright, Dankovsky thought, that’s quite the peek into the local culture. He interrupted the quarrel:

“In what ways could it be cursed and in what ways could it be blessed?” he asked simply. 
“These girls,” the most enthusiastic of the group began, a small smile digging into her red apple cheeks at having grabbed his attention before the others, “they see the beyond, you know.”
“What girls are you talking about?”
“The dancers. You mighta seen them.” He had, indeed, seen dancers. “This is a piece of dancer-rag. You must not touch the rags that have been against their skin directly, but this piece is from her kushak — y’see? Very light, flowy, you see the… uh… the stripes of the fabric on it. The way it was woven. They wear it tied around the belly — y’know, like a kushak. It flies around them when they run. The girl who had it musta gotten it stuck on something.”
“And in what way do they… ‘see the beyond’, as you’ve said?”

The Bachelor had vaguely induced, seeing them roam, pace the town up and down more madly than he did, eyes rolling up, down, throwing themselves to the ground, flailing with heavy panting; that they must’ve been in some kind of trance. Twyre-induced, maybe? The girl’s eyes gleamed with glee as he asked his questions; the boy next to her pouted.

“From the outside, they sometimes get into the inside of the earth, and from the inside they go outside. That way, they've seen the underbelly of the earth and the underbelly of the sky equally. So they... see things that most don't. Their rags are covered in seen-stuff. In seeing-stuff too.”
“In what way could that help your games?”
“Easier to play blind man's bluff when the blindfold tempers the blindness, isn't it?” the girl replied with a malicious twinkle in her eyes.
“That’s cheatin’,” the boy huffed in retort. 
“Don’t say that,” the girl waved her finger in his face, “you can use it too.”
“I don’t want to! It’s cursed, I told ya!”

The Bachelor considered he’d heard enough. The people were superstitious, children like adults, children ever-so-slightly-more than adults, it seemed — but he had the sneaking suspicion he was only just getting a peek at the depths of the town’s beliefs in folktales —, which was a vice, but not a sin. Sin he didn’t believe in, anyways.
Well, onwards. He thanked the two children for this informative discussion, and it seemed to please them to be told this, for they rounded the chest proudly and thanked him for being an attentive audience. He carried on east, crossing over the Gullet. He followed it up north, gauging the depth and color of the water, trying to see if some floating beast-carcass had not washed up on its banks and could be blamed for the spread of this strange sickness. Banks were clean, but not inhabited. Street urchins clung to his short grasses like barnacles, skipping stones. One of the dancers stood close to the edge, leaned to cup water in her hand, and poured it over her leg and foot, bloodied. Dankovsky was somewhat dumbfounded as to why she did not directly submerge her leg in water and instead made sure the washed-off blood dripped onto the grass, but this was not of his business either. What other strange people were there he had yet to meet?

     Andrey. Andrey, as fate would have had it! He who had stood in its light, facing it. He who dealt with it with a gunshot, if he was feeling distant, or a shanking, if in a more romantic mood. Dankovsky had noticed a set of shabby stairs, roughly carved in dark stone, off the side of the path he was wandering; those led to an equally shabby door and, had music not been permeating the wood from inside, dulling filtering out with a heady but tenuous smell of spices, Dankovsky would have believed this was a simple basement. The reunion was not particularly poignant, but Dankovsky was glad to see a familiar face amongst all of them. Dankovsky did not remember him as this strange of a character, but, ah, things change. Last time they had met, Dankovsky had not even put on her feet his Thanatica.

“You’ve met Eva?” Andrey asked, jovial.
“I have. She’s my host.”
“How do you find her,” he inquired in a low voice, tugged at the edges by a smirk, a hint that he knew this woman.
“Kind enough,” Dankovsky replied plainly. He knew Andrey was aware of his disinterest for women — he was just nosy. He’d never learn to mind his business, even if he expected others to not mind his. “She’s the dreamer type, isn’t she?”
“Is. Fits well enough in her salon, doesn’t she,” Andrey boastfully went on, leaning back, crossing his arms over his chest.
“What for, the clouds?”
“Precisely.”
“You had a hand in those?”
“Quite, I did!”
“It’s so…” Dankovsky squinted in reflection. “... Baroque. Unlike you. Was it your idea?”

This gave Andrey an unexpected pause. He pinched lips to one side, eyes looking to the other pensively. 

“Mine and others’.”
Dankovsky raised an eyebrow. Why the mystery? “You’ve gotten yourself assistants, in this town?”
“Yes, yes, oh my friend, I’ve got even better.” He slapped Dankovsky’s shoulder with an open palm, suddenly fraternal and overflowing as he sometimes was. “Have you been introduced to something else my brother and I have had quite the hand, indeed the only hand, in making?”
“Your brother?”
“You haven’t met him?”
“I might have and not known.” Dankovsky remembered Andrey mentioning his brother fondly back in their university days already, but had never put a face to the man. And of this town, he couldn’t remember any inhabitant he’d met bearing any resemblance to his old classmate. 
“Oh, that’s impossible,” Andrey laughed. “He’s recognizable through me as much as I am recognizable through him. He bears my traits. I bear his, like one does a sacrificial basket! He’s my Janusian half, watching the blood trail I draw after me as I watch the strewing of unborn miracles he leaves in his wake.”

The word made Dankovsky’s ear perk up like a hound’s; it pricked him across the nape like a sword does a corrida bull. 

“Miracles? How so?” He’d come for those, had he not? His sought miracle having vanished into illness, all others suddenly seemed interesting. He shared this, and Andrey continued :
“You ought to meet him,” he enthused, accompanied by wide gesticulations of his arm as he conjured in shape his brother’s height, same as his. “C’mon, follow.”

Did not give him a choice, did he? Well, this was as Dankovsky had known him. When Andrey offered an alternative, it was bad luck — for you, rarely for him. He trotted up the stairs of his den and held the door open for Dankovsky who, after him, struggled at each step, the smell of booze, smoke, spices, herbs, the persistent clay-scent that the dancers shepherded in all bashing his head in at the temples. Andrey must’ve been immune, or accustomed.
From the pub they went north, past the Saburov’s somber residence, towards the spot where the Gullet broke off from the Gorkhon and snaked south. 
Flanking an apothecary, a house of red and grey was surrounded by scaffoldings that held themselves on bird-legs stilts. The planks were thin and curved under the blowing of the wind. The support beams shivered. The whole thing seemed ready to fly off like a crane. Andrey pushed the door open and it almost pushed him back. He held it open with all his strength and waved Dankovsky in. 

“She’s not too happy to see me,” he stated with a smile.
“She?” Dankovsky raised an eyebrow. 
“The house.”
“Right, right.”

More superstition, now, was this? Had Andrey always been this way, or had the town imprinted its folklore into him, to the spirit, as he had stayed? His words hadn’t sounded like a curse of House like the Atrides dealt with, house standing in for kin — the building was just grumpy. Dankovsky was certain he heard it sigh, bothered, as Andrey closed the door behind him. His hair stood on his nape, and he hesitated to follow Andrey, who had begun climbing stairs by twos. “Peter!” Andrey hailed, hand in cup by his mouth so that the sound bounced. “Peter!” again, and no one, nothing really responded.

     The upstairs, this loft with visible beams, was cold — drafts snaked it through interstices. Not even the rugs, dirty and wide, seemed to ward off an iciness that rose from the floorboards. At the back of this mansard, cornered behind a desk like a scared animal, there was a man. The shape of man could only be guessed from the presence of a head of hair, the hint of a face behind it, as he was turned away from his visitors. Two hands poked out of a heavy quilt that made up the rest of the shape, numbly palming at the desk, the pens and brushes on it, the blank paper. The white face showed itself when Andrey hailed for the man who wore it, and he trotted to his brother’s side. Dankovsky followed, slow and measured, not too sure of how he’d be received. 

Andrey had not lied, they bore each other’s traits. This Peter looked like an Andrey sapped of his vigor and vivacity, visibly exhausted, face red with cold or drink, cheeks stubbled, mouth slack, shoulders slacker under his heavy quilt.

“Oh, what have you brought now?” Peter asked Andrey, his voice devoid of malice or aggressivity — thin, instead, thready as a pulse, woolen with a tiredness sleep couldn’t have fixed. His eyes were set on Dankovsky, talking as if he couldn’t answer. Dankovsky noticed how his left eye was greener than his right, and was not even shocked to see the opposite was true of Andrey. 

“Peter, meet Daniil Dankovsky,” Andrey began enthusiastically, a musicality in his voice like a horse at piaffe. He firmly grabbed Peter’s shoulders as if to wake him up, and made him wince instead. “He’s come to this town from the Capital in the search of a miracle.” This made Peter’s heavy lashes twitch — his eyes opened a bit more.
“I don’t think I’ve met you before,” Dankovsky said, offering his hand for Peter to shake. 

Peter observed him, with his now-wide open eyes, yes, one bluer and one greener, unmistakably so. He advanced, more cautiously than Dankovsky: 

“Oh, I believe I have met you, but you haven’t met me.” He took Dankovsky’s hand to shake. His was clammy, his fingers felt bony and tense, but the handshake was strong — too strong, maybe; his hand felt like a bear trap. “You can call me Peter. Or something else, indeed — Andrey is fine too.”

Dankovsky blinked once, twice. He looked down at Peter’s hand still squeezing his, and thought he’d have let go by now.

“And reciprocally, I take it?” he turned to Andrey instead. 
“Oh, absolutely not,” this one snorted with a genuine pout of offense. 

Damn, Dankovsky thought to himself, okay! Okay! No need for that!

“Why have you brought him here?” Peter asked his brother. “Are you an engineer? A geometrician?” (To Dankovsky, this time.)
“He’s a wonder-seeker,” Andrey responded before Dankovsky had time to. “He’s come to see prodigies, and I believe we just have one on our hands. Well, it’s left our hands — we have it still.”
“Miracle, you’ve said?” Dankovsky pointedly brought up the subject once more, hoping the word would wake Peter into saying more.
“Yes — oh yes!” Andrey barked, and Peter’s shoulders dropped. “It is not overselling it to call it this.”
“It is not,” Peter sighed, “but it hurts nonetheless.”
“‘Hurts’?” Dankovsky asked, a perplexed black brow crawling to the middle of his forehead. 
“Yes,” Peter tempered, a grimace of pain pricking through his left eye, that twitched. “A miracle hurts when its very existence feels to slip between the fingers of the one who’s done it. This is like a magic trick one achieved by sheer luck, and moving his fingers around in strange enough ways.”
“Follow us,” Andrey interrupted him as he addressed Dankovsky, throwing around his brother’s shoulders a fraternal arm infused with intensity, lightning, which made meek-looking Peter sway on his thin legs, “let us introduce you to her. We know you know her — just not as you should.”

“Her?” Dankovsky’s heart dropped to his stomach, bounced sickly. He had been as close to creating a human person as he thought he knew possible: he’d brought one back to life, if only for some short, infinite, precious seconds. He had to reason with himself: the two were artists, weren’t they? They had probably dabbled in she-marbles, she-paintings, she-bronzes with a soft patina applied to them. He followed the brothers as they rushed down the stairs, but the interrogation persisted. When they made it south, then west, across the Gullet again, Dankovsky didn’t even have a sneaking suspicion. 

     So it was theirs. This she-wonder, she had a name and makers, makers ecstatic, makers miserable. This she-miracle that, as Dankovsky approached town, tore through the sky in the shape of herself, slotting herself inside of the high heavens. Geometric Giant bridging half-sky and earth on a stem that, from the twins’ saying, could not support her own weight. Polyhedron — how many planes? Depending on which angle one stared at her from, eyes and brain didn’t quite hurt the same.

“She’s a savior,” Andrey waved at the tower, “saved us from exile out of this town. And, well, equally she solidified our banishment from any other.”
“How so?” inquired the Bachelor.
“Peculiar thing, she is,” Andrey replied with a gleam in his eye. Peter sighed, his mouth curling with pain. 
“Happenstance, again,” — his turn to speak, “she’s perfect. She’s monstrous. She’s loathed and worshipped for this.”
“Who wouldn’t want his creation worshipped?” Dankovsky pried once more.

He thought of his Thanatica. His Thanatica, under Death, priestess of it, which he’d have bowed and bayed and bent to consecrate — but this meant below’ing himself, crushing himself to sanctity’s foot. And he hated sanctity as much as below’ing. 
Peter’s mouth pinched and soured, bitterness hanging at the tubercle of his dropping upper lip. 

“No artist wants his creation worshipped. Worship bleeds art of its soul. Worship fills the hollow left after matter has been drained with ether and lies, stuffs it with fantasies until it bulges with meaninglessness.”

He held himself from spitting with disgust. Dankovsky eyed the tower again. 

“Are there people up there?” he asked, pointing at moving dots down its stairway.
“Yes,” Andrey replied. “Children of the town have taken residence up there.”
“Do you mind?”
“I don’t,” Peter answered in Andrey’s stead.
“Are they of its worshippers or of its virulent critics?”
“They’re perfectly ambivalent,” Peter said, and sounded softened with relief. “They see her as fit for their usage, without expecting anything more, anything else of her. They see her in ways even I don’t.”
“The Kain boy lives up there,” Andrey added. “I do not doubt he sees her as a kingdom in itself.”
“Not worship,” Peter shrugged. He soured again : “Not yet. But he’s a Kain. It’ll probably come.”
“The Kain boy?”
“If you haven’t gone up there, you haven't met him,” Andrey waved the mention of him with the back of his hand. “A wicked adolescent. A petty king like others are petty thieves, and I’d say this town needs more of the latter. Embroiled in some gang war with another, —”
“ — over my Tower, mind you,” Peter sighed.
“Doesn’t sound like ambivalence to me…” Dankovsky mumbled. 
“Still not worship,” Peter shrugged again. 

They stood in silence, all three huddling on the southern bridge over the Guzzle. Dankovsky, in awe, watched as the Tower didn’t even flinch when the wind picked up, even with so thin and bent of a stilt under it. Its light was milky, reminiscent of the inside of a scallop shell. It seemed to pulse.  

.❊.

     Illness swelled. Illness had swelled. Rubin was terrified — how frightening it was to see this man, this hide-clad giant with a scar on forehead, where life had tried to open him to take hold of his mind and failed, suddenly grow white-faced, stiff with fear, haunting on the tongue as he recalled the last bout of the disease. 
Illness had bulged and pushed itself against Eva’s door and she, breathless, panicked, had begged for leaving. She wanted Andrey to come with, and he, when found again, had bucked and been torn and his brows had furrowed with the utmost displeasure at leaving his precious co-creation, but he understood the urgency, and he saw how there would be no light to live through in this town, and accepted. And he wanted Peter to come with, and he (second), when found again, had retched, and belted, and bolted and paced. He had become cold and wan, shivered. He didn’t want to leave his Polyhedron. Not even illness scared him, he bitter, he soured of liver with Andrey’s pungent samogon. Not even death at the hands of the town’s rulers scared him — what could they do? Only he knew how to wrangle the blue mare that stood like an angel on a pin — only he knew, and didn’t know why. Dankovsky didn’t believe this tower needed wrangling. Indeed, with how deferent the brothers were to it, it seemed more like they were wrangled by it.

Well, it didn't matter, anyways. The train cars were penned. The beasts were corralled. The platforms were off-limits. The sickness — in what felt like a breath’s width’s timr — has blotted from the pit of the town to the edges of the steppe. It had rusted the hinges, the cast iron, it had loosened the rails. Mountainside landslide, it was; it spread itself as an invisible pile of rubble that barred the way. Oh, it was fast… Fast, fast in the stirrups of the white horse it rode — Pestilence or Conquest, scholars couldn’t agree, oh, how fitting it was regardless. Its blade carved an invisible trench on the soil, ready to swallow whoever tried to leave. So they stepped away. 

Poor Eva, they brought her back to her strange home, she was weeping with fear. Lock the door, my dear, Andrey held her shoulders, do not open to pestilence, and it will not come knocking. She didn’t look convinced, the poor thing, she wrapped herself in fine fabric and curled up on her settee. She craned her head back, stared at her painted ceiling. Her worried gaze softened. The peach clouds descended on her face, illuminated it. Dankovsky walked back out, where on its stem the Polyhedron swayed. 

Then he, Daniil, looked, and there before him stood the two others, one on this bank of the river and one on the opposite bank. Above them, the tower’s sides, thin as paper, looked to be of dyed linen, squares of cloth like sails, like gauze. Andrey spoke of it, to it: 

“How long will it be before these astonishing things are fulfilled?”

Indeed how long could this miracle stay? Dankovsky titled his head back. Up there, children paced. They played. Could illness climb up these stairs? 

“Come on, Daniil the Hesychast. Look me in the eye for once,” Andrey hailed him. 
“What’s this for? I am looking at you. You’ve heard me plenty.”
“Not nearly enough. You used to be insufferable with knowledge overflowing, opinions on everything, spitting words like snakes. Have these new circumstances got your tongue?”
“Doesn’t it seem evident to you? I’m a doctor. I might be the only one worth something in this town — bar maybe Isidor’s student, who I’m told good things about, but who seems petrified with fear. The people are already getting agitated.”
“Panem et circenses, my good Daniil, don’t you remember?”
“Bah!”
“Weren’t you thrown to the lions in a past life?”
“In a past one, maybe, and if it keeps going this way, in this one too.”
“A hunted man?”
“I shall be before long.”
“What do you fear?”
“If word of this disease makes it to the ears of the Capital, I daren’t imagine the type of befalling we’ll be put through.”
“Aren’t we youth?” Andrey asked, swinging from leg to leg, stepping into someone else’s steps. “Aren’t we still young? Haven’t we just made it out of the furnace? Daniil, shan’t we accompany you to Babylon?”
“Lower your voice,” Dankovsky scoffed, “we’ve barely put our feet to the flames. Something worse is still to come.”
“Prophetizing.”
“No, idiot. Bracing myself. It is my job to be ready.” He put his coat back on. Something heavy was weighting the fabric on the left — an empty vial in his pocket. “Besides, there are only two of you.”

At that, Andrey turned to Peter. Peter turned to the night that stretched behind him. Averting his gaze, he was. Or waiting on something from the darkness that itself was waiting to follow. 

“Let us not talk about this,” Andrey then spoke, his voice low. It faltered — forget the furnace, this was a candlelight. 

Then went, anapaest, man(-made) meter, after him: two unstressed, bouncy pairs of steps after his, dragging and heavy, boiling with ruminations.
Indeed, they’d barely put their feet to the fire. Dankovsky needed to think, and couldn’t, with these two ravens after him. He got back to the Stillwater. He waited for the town’s bell to chime a midnight, and when he was not engulfed in flames on the first minute of the new day, he let himself fall asleep.   

.❊.

     Illness was gaining speed. Illness was gaining ground — taking before it, as war does. 
From Rubin’s words, from Andrey’s too, from whoever he asked, this sickness was like a matchstick in a haystack, a spark thrown in an oil well. Lightning-fast to start, and it didn’t wind itself. It took until there was no more to take. 
Illness was taking its first dead, and taking them fast. It was maddening to Dankovsky that nobody could clue him on a mode of transmission. Come on, Isidor, his colleague, now dead, likely of this, this man knowledgeable, intelligent, couldn’t figure out transmission? Was it this elusive? Dankovsky had learned that Rubin had once worked alongside him — and he couldn't tell him either. What madness was this? 

Diagnosis: Sand Pest. Such was its name. It did not come from the sand, or maybe it did, and no one could prove nor disprove it. Prognosis: Not good. Bad. Quite frankly, shit. One could be cured, but healing was another story, and recovering, another one entirely. Crisis, exacerbation, paroxysm, relapse, convalescence, resolution — well, sucker, you’d be lucky enough to catch it before it reached its peak, and by then, either it was too late, or it wasn’t, and the only way to know was to try, and see if it failed. 
He disseminated the words like Death sowed before reaping. Stay home. Do not touch the sick. Do not handle the dead. Dead that not even he could handle! Some damned superstition over autopsy cloaked this town in medical darkness — probably some remnants of an ancient taboo about cannibalism that hadn’t caught up with the progress of modern medicine, some… belief about organ removal according to which a part of the soul would go with the taken liver, in the same way some people still believed pictures could capture the soul, or something of the sort. 
No matter how fast he thought he was, the mount of Conquest, which was that of Pestilence, was faster. 

He wanted to withstand this alone. Ruminations, excitation and fear bubbled under the white taut skin of his forehead; he could feel a headache coming on. He knew he wouldn’t be able to. 
He was told a man would come, a man who could help. I swear to god, if they make me go fetch him across town… 
He had waited half a day. 
Then, he heard Eva yelp, downstairs. Words exchanged, a man’s voice, low like the rumble of a wave, of a distant storm; his host’s high-pitched, hanged at the hook of fear. Do I need a weapon…? Dankovsky took a few steps away from the door. Damn, he should really ask for a gun. Just in case… Eva’s voice rang out again, frustrated this time, something like reprimands for some stains. Good, so she was alive. Heavy footsteps in the strange stairway. Dankovsky held his breath.
A man appeared. 
Had to walk sideways through the door he didn’t manage to push open fully. 
Tall, but not as tall as Rubin — which would be damn difficult to do anyways. Hair this tint of dirty blonde, a light and yellowed silt. A roman nose fleshy and soft-sloped, convex all the way down. A sharp jaw that jutted with effort, or with the gritting of teeth, greyed the thin cover of stubble. Bags under the eyes so deep and dark, Dankovsky could fit his whole closet in. His greek tunic, with its strange little leather pouch, was splattered with blood. His hands, his boots too; no wonder the woman downstairs had screamed. He tilted his head up and his gaze pinned Dankovsky straight through. Easy now!

“So it is to you I owe not being killed by my own folks.”

I mean, I suppose. Do you people not say “hello” in this town?

“I might be. And you are?”

The man approached. Dankovsky felt the tint of a threat in the way he took his step, and straightened the whole way up. The man took another, and immediately looked more mellow. Dankovsky breathed easier — he just had biases against the man because he’d heard his host yelp downstairs. That, and the blood stains… probably. 

“My name is Burakh.” He paused, seemed to reflect upon his words. “Son of Burakh. Of Isidor — I’m Artemy. I had come on my father’s solicitation, he said he needed me here.” As Dankovsky opened his mouth to offer his condolences, he continued: “I came home to him dead, and people after me.”

This was the man! The man Dankovsky was promised could help, the man who, despite the superstitions, was allowed to cut flesh. Isidor’s best student, just before, or just after Rubin. Dankovsky felt relief wash over him from the skull down.
His face was unreadable. Well, beyond the exhaustion, so obvious on every one of his features. Dankovsky felt his nape grow cold, a bead of sweat on it. He drew his gaze from Burakh-the-son’s face to his hands. To his sleeves, the bottom hem of his tunic, his boots. Red. 

“I didn’t kill him,” Burakh-the-son spat out, too aware of the Bachelor’s gaze on him. “He died from the Pest, didn’t he? Died before I’d even made it here. I didn’t even get to see him one last time.”

His breath had grown shallow, short, his jaw had clenched. “Easy, easy, Burakh,” the Bachelor wanted to tell him — as tall as he was, with his shoulders caving in under the pressure and the grief, he looked ready to tumble over like a checkmated piece. He composed himself quickly. Graveness washed over his face once more, he looked pissed.

“... This blood on your hands — you’ve killed anyways, didn’t you?” the Bachelor asked. “Did you murder in mindless fear? With nothing but superstition as accusation?”
“What are you on about? They were coming after me with knives! They jumped me when I hopped off the train!”
“What even for?”

Dankovsky saw how the man’s eyes, a diluted terre verte-watercolor hue, bluer than it was green, surrounded by a tired pink, welled up with tears; just enough to thin the color further and look like he couldn’t see through the glaze. 

“They thought I had killed my own father.”
Dankovsky felt his eyebrow twitch up to his hairline. “How could you have? You had just gotten off the train.”
“You could’ve told them this yourself and I don’t think they’d have cared. They want to kill the killer first, and only think about who he could be later.”

The tapered lid over Burakh’s right eye was slightly blue with some sort of timid bruise, the epicanthal fold of his left was reddened with, what, rubbing? Rubbing the tears off? 

“You have a twitch in your lip,” Dankovsky pointed, raising a brow.
“Which you wouldn’t notice if you were not staring,” Burakh hissed in return. 

Oh, that’s right. He was staring. The man had a wide mouth, and looked like he liked to run it in such a way that it agitated Dankovsky just enough. A deep and angular cupid’s bow above it sharpened with how he pinched his lips in something sour, bitter, tired. 
 
“... So what is it about, what you’ve said about me saving your skin?”
“The news of the disease killing my father made it across town fast. Besides those I killed upon arrival — to save myself, mind you —, nobody thought of me parricide. I’d like to thank you.”
“Know yourself quite welcome. I’ve been told you could help me.”

This piqued Burakh’s interest. He stood taller, and while the exhaustion didn’t wane off his face, and the blood didn’t run clear off his hands, he looked at least a little more awake. 
Indeed, he could cut bodies. And indeed, this made him more fit to navigate the town than the Bachelor, with his city shoes, his city clothes, his city tools, and his city manners. He said this, yes, yes he did, and Dankovsky congratulated himself on knowing, just knowing that man was going to say all that. It was like they had already met, and they’d already done all that. In a way, it was comforting. 
This man, who was allowed the butchering of cattle and the cutting of bodies, possibly the opposite too but Dankovsky preferred to not find out, was bestowed his father’s knowledge as inheritance. Folk medicine, folk tales, folk ways of knowing. Dankovsky grimaced hearing this, but reminded himself he’d been told Burakh could help, this man who, from his own words, was descendant of a long line of steppe haruspices. He knew little about the Sand Plague, which was still more than Dankovsky.

“Well… if nothing else good comes out of this situation, I hope I can write something of it… De Natura Pestis…”
“I hope your writing goes well, oynon,” Burakh whistled sourly. “I also hope you’ll join us in tending to the sick and trying to wipe that damned disease out.”
“Oh, do not take me for worse than I am, colleague — you’ll have enough to deal with me as I am,” Dankovsky huffed in piqued response, feeling across his whole face the crinkle of his nose. “Of course I’ll join you. The rulers of this town have already tasked me to bring their messages back and forth to solidify the declaration of a state of emergency.”
“You?”
“Me.”
“You, they’ve sent? Like a courier pony, galloping across town?”

Dankovsky felt his upper lip twitch, and the nose-crinkle spread to his brows. 

“They have. If you do not wish to be under the yoke of such important matters, I will not make you.”
“Oh, I’m glad they’ve chosen you to do this. I wouldn’t. I’d let them figure it out.”
“They will figure it out, and I’m here to help. But thank you, Burakh, for letting me do what I must: so I will let you.”
“Don’t let them wind you out with their orders,” Burakh said. And he had said kindly, with a softness which, well, Dankovsky could not call uncharacteristic, for he barely knew the guy. But, he thought, he also hadn’t been that disagreeable himself, so maybe Burakh was only returning the favor.
“I say the same to you.”
“I won’t obey them.”
“I’m afraid you just might have to.”

Burakh nonchalantly shrugged. The free-spirit, was he? Dankovsky couldn’t say he was not envious. Even in the Capital, he had had to answer to people — and he never wanted to, and he did as little as he could. Well, he just hoped Burakh would answer to him, at least a bit, at least in the ways that he was willing to reciprocate — they were after the same beast, after all. A beast too fast for the both of them, but if two pairs of legs could make a full horse, maybe they’d gallop fast enough to catch up. Let the hind legs not dissociate from the front legs, let the belly of the beast be full of productive discourse and camaraderie. Dankovsky offered his hand to Burakh to shake, and he hesitated, before wiping his palm on his pants — oh, right, the blood. And then shaking it.

.❊.

     Without the buzzing of the townsfolk, night was a noisy witch-cauldron, bubbling up with women’s singing. It reverberated as if hitting the bottom of a copper pan, a gong. Some building in town struck its hours of a loud bell; it was too far to be the Cathedral, too close to be the Theatre or the Townhall. 

     There is knocking. He hears, but doesn’t budge. There is knocking. He hears, but doesn’t budge. There is knocking. He spits out a curse and “fine, I’m coming!” before slithering out of the bed and into his pants, pushing his feet into his shoes, and walking to the door. 

“Come in.”

There is no one. He raises an eyebrow. 

“Come in,” he repeats, louder, clearer this time. 

There is no one. He opens the door and peers into the spiral of the stairway. There is no one; there is downstairs a faltering candlelight that licks the base of the steps weakly, languidly. The angular shadows seem to carve the rock into itself, hollowing it cobalt and black. There is something — it trails down the stairs with a whisper, with the brush of cloth, damask or velvet. The light shudders after it like after footsteps — maybe there were footsteps. Dankovsky takes a first step down, and walks on.
Even with some of the candles still on, in the cold and thick silence downstairs he thinks Eva is gone — before spotting her in the bed, blanket pulled over her body and to her jaw, facing the wall so only her blonde locks betray her presence; not even her breathing does. There is no one — the front door yawns. Heaves even a bit. He makes his way to it and opens it just a sliver, peeking outside. There is no one. There is no one. This was no one. There is no one. There is someone. He hurries upstairs and closes the door. He hurries to the desk to grab the chair and sets its back beneath the handle, keeping it in place. He hurries to the bed, pants still on. It dawns on him that he might have locked whoever that could be in here with him. He closes his eyes, and there is knocking. 

.❊.

     De natura tesquorum, De natura urbis, he be damned: when he would get out of this, he’d have enough for five tomes. This “steppe disease” didn’t know borders; neither border between plains and town, nor border between insides and outsides. It so grossly turned people inside-out — the coughing, neverending, scraped the lungs from the black meat holding together the ribs, and spilled ‘em through the open mouth, the nose. The skin became marred with red meanders that twisted on themselves like the pattern of intestines — they didn’t seem to follow the paths of veins and arteries; and if they did, it was because they were remaking them entirely.
It was not enough that people — most people, more and more people — came into the theatre, the hospital, the hospital-theatre, this unmade stage both comedic and tragic in its functioning-performance, obviously plague-ridden, which was hard work enough, the hardest of the works; but many also came sick with something else. Chicken pox here, measles somewhere else; some other damn pox, tuberculosis. Mothers would come in with thickened, black lungs from sitting by the fire in their tiny black houses, with their tiny black windows, so, not plagued, right? and Dankovsky would walk over to Burakh to retrieve his stethoscope, and the mothers had been moved—left feet first. The plague had slithered in. Like a snake, struck, bitten, poisoned. Fathers would come in with a horrible wet cough, common, characteristic, well yes, smoker, are you? yessir, takes my mind off the work, very well, just a second — looked away, plague struck. Trample, hoof kick. Even war did not claim lives this fast. Dankovsky was becoming dizzy. 
He had not swayed astray — the path was laid, straight, ablaze with light. The path was narrow; it led to eternal life. It was in front of him, strewn with the dead, the dying, and broken glass.

Bodies weighted on his arms, so heavy he thought they’d break right off at the elbows. 
He was standing by the Theatre’s doors, theatre-hospital-morgue theatre-slaughterhouse, quite frankly, theatre sunken and sullied, blood-stained, swollen of and swelling with wailing. Back pressed against the red brick, pressed so hard as if he hoped the force would shatter him, Dankovsky struggled to catch his breath. 
He’d fought for this hospital, in this town that didn’t have a hospital, maddening as it was, such an industry, such a slaughter, proximity, promiscuity, poverty and sickness crawled the streets as orphans did even in peace-times so how, so why?! He almost sank to the ground but his legs couldn’t even bend. 

“Oynon.”
“Jesus Chr— Burakh, you scared the daylights out of me.”
“You looked so out of it.”
“I was.”

He wanted to peel his gloves off and press his palms to his eyes, press so hard as if he hoped they’d pop right out and save him the vision of the slow, excruciating, grief-clothes-tearing, despaired-knees-bruising, indiscriminate reaping by the disease, or maybe it was not indiscriminate, and it infuriated him even more to not know. He wanted to peel his gloves off, but not in front of Burakh. For all he knew the illness could slither through between leather and sleeve. 

“You’ve been working a lot, oynon.”
“You too.”

He dropped his head. It felt like it could have snapped off his neck. 

“Thank you, by the way,” he breathed out. “I know you have a lot on your plate.”

Burakh didn’t reply. He did have a lot on his plate. Dankovsky had gone to Old Burakh’s house and had almost not come out unharmed. Whatever had happened in this damn house, this damned house — the Haruspex’s childhood home now a cup filled to the brim with despair, drunk by someone, it must have been, and if it wasn’t drunk, the bloodwine had gone bitter and still, waiting for lips of mouth or lips of wound to close around it — it couldn’t have been good, it couldn’t be good. It lingered somewhere. Smelling of sacrificial ash, it clung to the man the Bachelor saw fish a cigarette out of a pocket and offer it to him. 

“... That looks strange, Burakh.”
“Huh?” Burakh took a better look at it. “Oh. My bad, that’s not tobacco. This one’s got herbs in it.”

A crude chortle punched through Dankovsky’s palate and nose, and Burakh shrugged apologetically. 

“Does it… do anything?” the Bachelor inquired, eyebrow rising with a twitch. 
“Yeah.” Burakh shoved it back into his pocket. “That’s why I have it.”

Dankovsky snickered adolescently. Keep it for when it’s all over, Burakh — then we’ll have grounds for celebration.

.❊.

     Goddammnit, god-fucking-damnit, be they cursed, be they cursed to all damned hell! How long would he have to do the rulers’ bidding, how much more skin would he have to leave to this game of theirs? It was evening of the same fourth day, and Viktor had sent him to the Skinners — how fitting of a name, now was it!

A mugger, a pathetic thug, driven mad by the greed for the dead's coin and ware, for the dying's belongings and houses, for the living's... whatever the living still had, had sliced of his blade Dankovsky's flank. It had ricocheted against a button, slid upon the woven fabric, and snipped through skin and flesh, missing the organs and bones. (Dankovsky couldn’t say he would have preferred it that way, but as he limped back to the Stillwater, pinching his taut, dehydrated skin to hopefully stifle the bloodflow, he couldn’t help but think about having been delivered from all of this bullshit.) A second strike had hit him on the shoulder, right between the round head of the humerus and the clavicle — this one bled loud and heavy, too, but the Bachelor could tell it was superficial, he’d slap a bandage on it and it’d be done with, fuck, it was really red, though, agitatingly, tauntingly so. He had wrestled the mugger off with gloved fists, which maybe hurt him more than they did the looter, pushed him away at dullblade-point — closer to a bluff that had been, but maybe he was not as bad of a knife-fighter as he was afraid he was, even bleeding out. 
He limped to the Stillwater bent to his side, almost crouching, trying to keep the gaping mouth of his wound shut. He groaned and heaved as too wide of a stride pulled on its edges and whipped him with pain. 
He climbed the stairs, pulling his weight at the railing, and collapsed into the attic. He whined with exhaustion, whined at the burning sting, whined with frustration thinking of the Kains who were waiting, crossed-hands and crossed-feet in the cross-hairs, for a report on the Skinners situation — here’s your report, here are your Skinners, the Bachelor just met one! 
As he stumbled on to fetch thread and needle from his bag, he found Burakh. Sitting on the chair, in the dark, like a sphynx, like a pillar, like a creep. The white of his eyes was fluorescent in the dark, he was staring intently at Dankovsky, gaze drawing from his face to his flank, to his face again. 

“Why in god’s name are you here,” the Bachelor heaved as pain crept up his side and bled down, to his hip. 
“I wanted to ask you for some thread,” came Burakh’s reply from the darkness as if darkness itself had spoken; the shape of him was hazy. 
“You need thread, why?”
“Brewery. I need to repair my father’s brewery. To do my job.”
“Couldn’t you have asked Lara? She is your friend, isn’t she, doesn’t she sew?”
“At this hour? Oynon, I’d have to steal.”
“What’s a little stealing between friends,” Dankovsky snickered through gritted teeth — he heard the creak of enamel as he reeled in a wince. 
“What’s a little borrowing between colleagues?”

Dankovsky stilled to think, unsteady; swayed on his heels, and Burakh got up to offer an arm to keep him from collapsing. 

“You can have some thread if there is some left once I’ve stitched myself back up, alright, Burakh?”
“Let me see, I’m a surgeon.”

Dankovsky froze. There had been an order in that voice, an order sneaky, steady, stuffy, covert  — or had there? There was power in holding the needle — more than in holding the knife. Probably. Or maybe Dankovsky was just losing his mind. Harder and more humbling to offer help to the living than to dissect the dead, wasn’t it, so how much of himself was Burakh trying to put above Dankovsky? Was it more, or less than he let show, lowering himself to the Bachelor’s level with what seemed like genuine enough of worry on his face? Dankovsky breathed deeply, straightened his spine so Burakh straightened his. 

“Sit back down, then. Let me discard my coat.”

Burakh didn’t-quite obey; he didn’t sit. Oh, but he leaned against the desk, just enough that its top reached the back of his thighs. But didn’t sit. 
Dankovsky shrugged off his coat, shoulder on the unaffected side first, so its own hanging weight finished peeling it off his back. Keeping an eye on the other man and seeing how his worry didn’t ease, how it began bearing tint of confusion, then, at the view of the blood stain, of deference, Dankovsky thought to himself he would be a massive dick if he tried to get himself killed just for things to get easier, to get back into familiar territory — a deal with Death, instead of this... slaughterhouse of an infantry charge into its maw. Dankovsky hesitated before peeling his cravat off — Burakh turned his back to him, giving a semblance of privacy. 
He opened his shirt, and pulling it off felt like moulting. The linen was sticky with sweat, damp with blood around the wound, it clung to skin and hairs, it was harder to pare than to split fascia fibres. He discarded it eventually, and blood drops flew across the room. One might have even landed on Burakh. He began unbuttoning the upper half of his union suit, feeling how as he tugged its knee-length legs rode up wetly, scraped hairs with sweatblood, a sickening mixture like sap. Hearing him grunt in frustration, Burakh spoke: 

“Need a hand?”

Dankovsky stilled. He had been trying to writhe out of that suit grotesquely, was bent to the side as to not pluck the strings of strident pain. He’d only managed to bare half of his shoulder and was hoping that pulling would free him at once. 

“Let you fiddle with my underwear? What, Burakh, without even a drink?”

Blooddrunkenness had him blurting out some real stupid stuff. None of which he meant, honest, but by god, was he trying to make all of this easier on the both of them, for he was not managing to make it less painful. Were he any more conscious, he’d have been struck with a shiver of mortification — instead, in his state, apprehension barely grazed the back of his mind, where fear and shame beat steady like two halves of a second heart.
Burakh snorted, a noise casual and easy-going enough that Dankovsky felt himself sigh in relief.

“You’re funny, oynon. Actually, you’re not this funny when you’re not wounded.”
“Don’t get any ideas. But enjoy the opportunity to even hear it, Burakh. I’m somber even when drunk.”
“Something you have in common with that Architect I’ve seen you with, isn’t it?”
“Oh, he is even more somber when sober.”

Eventually, Dankosvky managed. 

“Alright, bring yourself up here. Thread and needle in the bag — the silver tin.”
“That one?”
“No, the one with the, uh—” (He sighed. His commitment to his work, his line of work, in the line of sight of Death, keeping her as an amulet like it’d bring him more luck in avoiding her, was making him look obsessed, now, wasn’t it?) “—the embossed skull and bones. With memento mori underneath.”
“Right.”

The Bachelor watched him approach, carrying the needle like a torch. Of that, in the attic, there was only the shadow: a few stray candles on the table, that were smooth and tall three days ago, now slumped upon themselves, beige burls like tree roots with melted wax. The flame flickered — swayed in the stuffy air like spruce treetops. 
The Bachelor bent a knee by the bed, lowering himself until he could stretch comfortably. Pain beat heartly, pulsated from its source and slithered between ribs. He leaned back on an elbow, and Burakh kneeled for a better look.
He was very silent as he pinched the lips of the wound, pricked through. Thread-bridge made. It entered him white and came out scarlet. Dankovsky wished he was drunk, for the color reminded him of Merlot. His mouth would have watered, were it not tasting of copper. Voice made the candlelight shiver, and Dankovsky did under the pricking of the needles, so they didn’t speak. The wound was a palm's-width long, thin like a tightrope. Burakh walked it very carefully with suture thread, and whatever else he found. One hand firmly pressed against Dankovsky’s oblique, index-palm-thumb following the hookshape of it, he held the skin close, but not tight. He moved the palm inch by inch as he — impressively — used one hand to manage needle and thread, until he needn’t anymore. When Dankovsky breathed out, the thread pulled; a dull, almost comfortable ache echoed the lungs.

     Burakh had stayed in that attic as Dankovsky cleaned himself of the blood; indeed he was holding that full basin like a ceremonial basket-bearer. Dankovsky dipped sponge to water, washed flank of sponge, dipped sponge to water again, washed shoulder, this time. Possibly one of the dumbest things he’d done so far, as stray drops coursed down his leg, and he couldn’t shrug the top of his union suit back on without it getting wet-sheer. Whatever, he thought, damn it. Burakh didn’t look fazed by his actions, so he kept on doing it. Then, his head began to spin. 
Oh, idiot he was, the bloodloss. The bloodloss, the adrenaline rush that suddenly threw itself off the cliff of his tenseness like a hunted horse; his whole body felt as if filled with tar, he stumbled on his feet. 

“My body is failing me,” he had the présence d’esprit to bitterly laugh. “I fear I won’t make it to thirty.”
“When’s your birthday, oynon?” Burakh promptly and dryly asked, rushing across the room to get rid of that basin, obviously trying to keep Dankovsky conscious for just one second more.
“First of December,” Dankovsky replied as dryly — his mouth had gone to wool. 
“What’s that, Sagittarius?”
“Yes. Ophiuchus, if one wants to get ironic about it.”
“What’s the ironic part?”
“Means serpent-bearer.”

He’d have laughed some more, not unaware of how his taste reflected the title, or vice-versa — he was not really in shape to muse about the determinism of the stars, the branding of a name — the sides of his vision were going black, tightening, closing in, strangling clarity out of his eyes. His face felt to fall off his skull, he saw more than felt, and he didn’t not see much, the height of his eyes drop as his knees buckled. 

“Oynon, can you sit on the bed and put your head between your knees?”
“I’m fine, Burakh,” he said, being fine only extremely relatively and put in perspective against the shapes of things to come. 

He managed to sit, then collapsed backwards. Light was a pin above his head, a sea-bird watched by the sea-sick, lying shivering on the deck. Burakh grabbed his heels, and elevated his legs. Blood flew back; he could feel his heartbeat behind his eyes, through the sheer canvas of his lips. 

“You don’t look too good,” Burakh (rightly) said. 
“Flattery won’t get you anywhere.”

His breath was thin, his pulse thready. It grew louder. Denser, thicker. It swelled under the flesh of his cheeks and reddened him gracelessly. Burakh didn’t laugh at his little joke, which made him somewhat-wince (not even the strength to grimace), but did not make mention of it anyway, which made him somewhat-ease.  

“These people’re getting on my damn nerves,” he eventually sighed out — that one came from the heart. He knew it did, because he felt lighter after saying it. 
“Who, the muggers?”
“Muggers, rulers, thieves, why even look for hierarchies or distinctions now? Quite frankly, they all bleed into each other.”

He clicked his tongue. The clock replied in kind. 

“Ha. Bleed.”

     Oh, yes, Burakh’s thread. Well, he got it. He thanked the recovered Bachelor, and trotted out — galloped out, head low, dragging clouds of sand after his cavalcade. Man didn’t tread lightly on that earth. Well, neither did his sisters, or whatever the strange women outside were called or called themselves; the Bachelor could hear them run, trample, stampede and stomp. One would start to sing, and five, or twenty would follow.  

     As night fell, black-cloaked mistress, the one he can believe in the powers of, tenebrous, dense in the flesh with fumes and the scent of twyre, the room grew black and bloated around him like flesh around a shard, a nail; hangnail; hanging. Time tiptoed in the shadows of the attic, hurried and nestled, hissed and nettled. 
Hanging, about hanging; the hanged man. On the nature of gallows… The room grew black and bloated like the corpse of a hanged man around him and he (maybe it, elseone) thought he could figure out why. 
He put together a hospital. It worked enough as a hospital. Possibilities should feel infinite. Yet everything felt stuffier, misery closer than it appeared. 

Here was the truth; the truth of this reality, experienced firsthand, for oneself. Here it was: if there was something, anything, it was more unloving than Dankovsky, for it let the sick to writhe and scream and the dying to die slowly while Dankovsky offered ultimately-possibly-pointless painkillers to the condemned so the way down was as painless as it could be, and Dankovsky never saw himself as particularly loving. If there was something, anything, it was more powerless than Dankovsky, for it let the sickness ooze and seep and bleed through the town like a gunpowder trail setting the bodies ablaze while Dankovsky ordered quarantines and was obeyed, ordered lockdowns and was obeyed, and, if fate was good to him, healed someone — even if it was one, just one. And Dankovsky always saw himself as only mildly powerful, teetering on edges and tightropes over power struggles. If there was something, anything, and it was loving, and it was powerful, then it just didn’t know. While Dankovsky knew, in the flesh, in the meat of the lungs. Set ablaze. 
If there was something, anything, it was below him. A bitter laugh tore through his gritted teeth. Below him. Where the rot lay and the light died with the rest of the buried. 

Rot slithers in through the cracks — on his face, faltering and waning like a suffocating flame; on his hands, dry, peeling, sandy from the washing, the rinsing, the washing again, the coarse chemicals (he hopes it is not too noticeable when he rubs the back of his hands, checking for warmth, for the telltale crumbling-into-dust that the Pest strikes people of like the blunt head of a mace, gritting his teeth at the disinfectant-induced chappedness — at what he hopes is disinfectant-induced chappedness, on his body.)

     He tried to sleep. 
Whoever this was — whoever that was that had crawled out of the shadows like from the bruisepurple waters of the Styx, whosever teeth and eyes those were white of snow against a curtain flesh-red, they hailed him in a whisper.

“Your only chance of becoming immortal is to be killed.”

Dankovsky blinked. He swallowed thickly and all the blood in his face felt to drain off it and flow down to his lungs. 

“This is exactly what I’m fighting against,” he spoke back.
“Thought thou were fighting against Death, not murder,” the voice replied, a note of piqued inquisition on its black shadowtongue.
“One’s still dead regardless of how he gets there,” the Bachelor gritted. His back hit a wall, but he hadn’t budged.
“Thou thinkest so. ‘Tis fear that holdeth thee, pulls on your reins ‘till your teeth break. You shake. Your knuckles grow white as all that sick blood is spat and spilled. You’re hoping to swallow Death like serpents do the sun. Death kills fear, but fear cannot kill death.”
Dankovsky’s eyes widened. “I know you.”
“You cannot. You know me alive. You know what I’ve built. This is all you need to know. But this is not all there is to.”
“Who are you?” (Dumb question.) “What are you?”

Whoever this was, he blinked. 

“I’m Chiron. I’m Charon. I’m the Akheron.”

Whoever this was, his mouth must’ve stretched in a smile, because Dankovsky could see his teeth, a delicate and pearlescent dice-ivory, chipped off at a corner of an incisor, gleaming softly. 

“And you are in my house.”

(Dankovsky was in the waters of the Styx; the still Styx waters.)

.❊.

     People stopped for the funeral processions. Then, they became so numerous that people would stay frozen in place, pinned by the blade of that Plague, of fear, like a clock having stopped.
When the cemetery’s soil became swollen with the succumbent, they lit pyres, from out in the steppe first, dotting the outskirts, burning cyclopean walls around the city, then into town, closer to its core, like trench lines closing in. No beacons hailing the victory of Argos from the violent sea of the Hellespont, those were dirge-followed torches that lit silent and still processions, the living too scared to take part or yet, sit apart. 
He disliked the mythical image of Agamemnon’s victory this brought; he had been named after a prophet too, after all. 
For now he felt like the watchman on the rampart walls; he had no one to tell of the fires: they could be seen, they could be felt; they could be breathed and swallowed; they could be partaken in, if you were particularly unlucky — or lucky, as perspective had it. Right as he bitterly laughed to himself, to his wait for the chorus to come in and wail over the blood spilled that called for the spilling of blood, women’s voices, outside, started rising like smoke. 

     Death follows — fast. It is on its feet faster than the tides run or drown — one cannot swim in these waters, putrid and brown with the ichor of blood, dirt and sweat. Run faster than it, prophet-named Bachelor, because it shifts shapes slower than it runs — and it shifts shapes fast.
Dankovsky feels himself morphing too — and all metamorphoses involve pain. Piercing, throbbing pain tears through the right side of his face, trickling from the hairline down like an open wound. Into the collar, over the ribs, crushing his lungs.
The miserably low lights of the makeshift hospital, these minuscule solomonic-columns-like candles made by women of the town, strewn between the beds where the chandelier bound to the stage cannot reach, aggravate his headache — squinting, he feels pin-pricks of darkness pierce the field of his vision, poking holes through the tapestry before his eyes. 
He thinks himself getting sick, and rationalizes otherwise (and tells himself, because tales are all that will be left if he doesn't act, if they don't act, it sickens him to know he's not alone in this fight) — the stress, he concurs, the stress is weighing on his lungs like a nightmare, black night mare, all of her hooves through his bones and to the marrow, to the spine.
It is evening of the fifth day, and he has just come back and lain on the bed in the attic, and the hooves are piercing through him above the diaphragm, in the hollow of the coastal arches, pinning him to the bed like a moth still pathetically flailing a wing.

Think fast. Act faster. You might just make it. Death bites into the crowd — indiscriminately it seems; then there appears a pattern beyond the simple laws of exposure and infection, then it is gone. Nasty volatile bird, cawing here and chirping there. Praying, he's told, in other people's ears — praying for what? He's not a pious man. He's stopped praying a long while ago, and even when he did, he didn't put much faith into it. (Ha. FAITH! like it hadn't failed him more times than he could count! ‘Twas more fickle of a friend than an oracle was straightforward.)

Faith — there's not much else to have. He's not sure how much Burakh wants it from him — if he even wants it at all. But the days go, and the lives with them. He's not sure what else couldn't fault him. He misses, almost, Death as it once was — an almost placid force that he knew (he thought) (he thought he knew) he could stand up to. Battering ram against battering ram, not breaking in the castle doors, but opposing the other's war. Death, back then, was winning more often than not (well, it always won in the end, but the Bachelor could put up a fight), but it was, mostly, a fair foe.
But this was—this is no Death. This is Conquest, and Pestilence.
(The black night mare, dusk after dusk, bleeds out her colors, pales like a wet ink stain patted then rubbed dry; like bone slowly sun-bleached. She turns the color of blood-stained enamel, of the rot of a cavity.
Rot, rot, rot. To the bone, to the marrow.
Whatever this Death is, it is unforgivingly rusting, biting through the sick until they crumble like red dust.)

.❊.

     If similia similibus curantur — if like [was] cured by like, what cured this? What was this? Fleeting, fast on its feet. Whatever it was, it could think — or it could not, and it was just easier to believe it did. It was reassuring to project oneself in a combat of equals when everything seemed to slip out of one’s grasp. The Bachelor felt like he’d been tempting it, whatever-it-is, for days now. He’d poked, pricked, he’d flailed himself in front of its eyes and evaded it at the last possible second — such had been his reckless acts of locking himself in plagued houses, in walking into those of the dead just to check nobody was still poisoning the walls from inside. Illness from inside, illness like mold, like living animal. He’d waved in front of its eyes the red flaying of himself, it omnipresent, it charging. Omnipresent, charging, trampling, evasion maneuver, evasion maneuver, only the green horse of Luck held the Bachelor still standing, feet in the stirrups. Prick and poke. Evade the charge. Evade and tease it of red, watch it kick up sand —

— bulls.

Bulls omnipresent, bulls trampling, charging. Similia similibus curantur. 
Let him not get too ahead of himself — he shook his head promptly, and hoped the disruption would set his thoughts back straight. This bordered on folktales, regardless of how dire the situation is. Still, he had a gnawing feeling there was a hint of truth to his mystical spirals and slides — but something in the same vein (vein—AH! ah! he bitterly laughed to himself) had to make more sense, something about blood. 
Zoonotic diseases — evidently. The town was ripe with bulls, full to the gills of them — rather, the meat of them. So many had been recently slaughtered, their blood gorged the dry earth, seeped through the pores of its topsoils, the windbitten hollows of its rock. It spilt into the river, it tainted the water. Early agro-pastoral societies were decimated by zoonoses, the newfound proximity to the beasts poisoning settlements from the inside. Worshipped animals both sowers and reapers. How could he forget — cowpox, the milkmaids! Dankovsky threw himself on the desk, one of its corners knocking straight between two ribs as he stumbled, and scribbled a note. He launched himself at the open window, paper in hand, and hailed into the street for whoever would turn their heads. A ginger girl trotted up, her curious eyes studying him. He’d seen her, hadn’t he? 

“If I give you this,” Dankovsky yelled from his perch, “would you bring it to Artemy Burakh? Could you find him?”
“Yes and yes”, she replied, “no one can escape my little eye.”
“A spy, are you?” Dankovsky almost laughed in relief, and folded the paper into flying-enough of a shape. He watched as it drew a loop, a wide spiral up to the river’s edge, and as he held his breath, his messenger jumped to catch it. 

She ran off, then, darted like a fawn. Dankovsky told himself that if he wanted the town to rely on him, he needed to rely on the town. The kids were good messengers, good barterers, good spies — better in their role than he was in his. 

     Burakh came. He didn’t look too well on his legs — on the rest of his body either. In the darkness that had crept — it could be anything from seven in the evening to one at the foot of dawn — he was paler of face than the apocalyptic horse whose attribute paleness was. He breathed short and sharp, heavy. Composure whistled between his teeth as he tried to swallow it back, to fill his lungs with it. He presented two vials with an extended arm; Dankovsky was almost impressed at how his fingers curled around the flasks, grasp seeming uncomfortable and unwieldy, yet so steady he had to pry the grip open with his own. 

“You have blood on your hands.”
“I do. It’s the bulls.”

Dankovsky was not doubting it, but something in Burakh’s voice made him shiver. A pearl of lament, nestled grey and dull in the shell of his mouth. It was held in place with the tightening of his throat around it. Dankovsky hooked an index — gloved — over Burakh’s ring finger and pulled lightly, just enough to have room to slither his pinch in, and slowly dislodge the vial from the top. 

“You sound and look winded. Have you run?”
“On my way here.”
“Fast?”
“Quite.”
“Were you pursued?”
“No.”

His voice strangled him like a noose. It didn’t sound like a lie, though. Dankovsky took a step back, slowly, expecting to see Burakh crumble. He did not, miraculously so, and Dankovsky prepared a first blood smear on a slightly scratched glass slide. Burakh somewhat-followed, steadier in his grasp on the other flask than on his feet, to peek over his shoulder. 

Dankovsky observed the first slide, then, after having smeared the second sample, that one as well. 

“No movement,” were his first words out of the world of study. “Bacteria are standing still. I can see them so clearly. Crescent-moons in shape.”
“May I see?”

The Bachelor shuffled his seat to the side so Burakh could lean in. 

“... Shapes of a hook.”
“Yes. Or a crooked beak.”
“Unusual shape.”
“Unusual disease.”

Burakh stood back. 

“Your conclusion?”
“Bull’s blood kills the reproductive mechanisms of the bacterium. Does not kill the bacterium itself — see how clearly we can observe it, intact, untouched — but it stops its progression. Human’s kills the bacterium, just not fast enough to keep it from overwhelming the immune system. Both of those properties are essential to an effective vaccine.”

Dankovsky stood up. Burakh moved ever-so-slightly out of his way. 
Dankovsky felt his thoughts brewing, the characteristic bubbling of the mind that bordered on cephalgia. He felt warmth behind his eyes — from exhaustion, the dull candlelight, rumination that shone through the lens of his shrinking sanity and, focused in a sharp pin of cogitation, set flames where it landed. 

“Say, Burakh, your steppe tales do not make mention of a man-bull hybrid roaming the plains outside, now, do they?”
“Even if they did, oynon, it would not make him easier to catch.”
“It would not, indeed.”

Dankovsky wanted a cigarette so, so bad. He wanted to take off his gloves and scratch the nervous itch that was prickling the back of his hands. 

“That, and—let same be cured by same. So far, it hasn’t worked — but nothing has. And I’m not fighting against a myth,” he mumbled.
“It is retold as one. But as you’re seeing… it is not.”

The itch grew — spider-sprawling, this annoying, featherlight, maddening thing, grazing nothing but the topmost tissues.  

“… In other aspects, you’re fighting well enough, I take it,” Burakh’s voice reached Dankovsky through his irritation.
“Purely defensive,” the Bachelor scoffed.
“With this stockpile?” Burakh, eyebrow raised and rippling through nervous forehead, pointed at, well, a stockpile (a small one, nothing to write home, or the authorities, about), shotguns and revolvers neatly laid out on the floorboards like sleeping dogs, ammo cartridges equally methodically sorted on a table.  
“Yes, Burakh.”
“How does one even get to such a collection?”
“Asking.”
“Asking?”
“The powerful of this town, they owe me. The less powerful, but equally weapons-minded, too. All that I'm doing for them…”

Dankovsky remembered Bad Grief’s bullshit with Barley’s bandits, Saburov’s inability to keep even the lowest of thugs on a leash, getting fucking shanked, running for the Kains, running for the Olgimskys, running, running, the headache was worsening. He must have grimaced, because Burakh spoke to pull him out of his thoughts, wrinkling his nose. 

“Running ‘round town like you’ve been bitten by a horsefly to try and get in these people’s good graces enough that they supply you guns? Is this your method?”

Dankovsky shrugged. He didn’t have it in him to feel offended — well, maybe he was a bit, just a bit, a biting bit, a nibble at his pride — for the image of him as a horse madly galloping across town felt true enough.

“You don’t have to like it.”

What was he to do, defend himself with his fists? He’d tried — fists and blade, see where that had led him. He patted his stitched side and, following the gesture with his eyes, Burakh got the message, and dropped the subject. 

     Dankovsky’s hypothetical chimera, who could cure the disease’s shapeshifting with its own, obsessed him. Eyes darting back and forth between the two smeared slides, his leg bounced restlessly. He got up and began pacing. Burakh, sitting on the edge of the bed precariously, as if ready to jump up, hands collapsed between his parted knees, watched him do so. 

“You don’t look too good, Burakh,” Dankovsky eventually said. 

Which was true, wasn’t it? Dankovsky had no idea how bad himself looked, but he imagined his face was not too unlike Burakh’s, and Burakh’s was marred by an exhaustion so deep it seemed to hollow him out from inside, thinning the colorful tapestry of his face until the poisonous lead of weariness and prostration bled through. Weft of his face was dark with the bruise-blue of sleep and stubble, warp was grey of sunken eyes, cheeks, of dull shadows that not even the golden source of could liven up. 
Even through this, through all of this, Burakh’s lip twitched, moving the fog of fatigue on his features like a trample kicks up sand, and he laughed. 

“Flattery won’t get you anywhere.”

His gaze caught the Bachelor’s like a hook. He stared in wait. What…? Oh — hah! Dankovsky laughed in turn.

“Of course you’d remember that line.”
“It wasn’t that long ago.”

Felt like it, though, didn’t it? The Bachelor laughed again to distract himself from that thought, then—

“I cannot in good faith let you back out in this state. I do not doubt you’re cunning enough to get yourself a bed somewhere — but you look like you’ve seen me before: utterly worn-out.” 

Burakh blinked wearily at this. 

“Your head only stays screwed onto your neck because your whole spine is tensed like a hunting bow. You need to sleep, and sleep here. You look like you’d collapse right by the door. And I don’t feel like hauling your carcass back up the stairs.”

Burakh snorted with bitter irony, his lips twitched in what, had he had the strength, could have been a smile. 

“Wouldn’t want to scare the lady of the house, right?” Burakh added grave(l)ly. 
“I’ve sent her away,” Dankovsky flatly reported. 
“Away?”
“To the Trammel. I believe she’ll be taken good care of there.” A pause. That was one way to put it. “I know she will.”

She had pouted, worried face less childish than genuinely scarred, her blonde brows bending in worried waves, pouted a mellow moue like what of a weeper. Such a face would have worked on plenty of other men, on most other men, maybe, but Dankovsky was not another man. One woman this grimace, this expression of a wounded doe could have worked on — the one Dankovsky sent Eva to. So she’d gone, wrapped in a long shawl like that of a mourner, trailed by the smells of honey, milk, water and wine, perfume, all the libations she had no grave to pour over. 

Reluctantly, Burakh agreed. Reluctantly, with a dark cloud passing over his face, he kicked his boots off, one by one. He kicked his boots off, slowly, carefully, meticulous in a way unlike him, and unlike what the situation called for. Dankovsky noticed, leaning against his desk, that he was mindful not to let the sole rise too high off the floor. Caught a glance, though — looked red. Threw glance, across the floors to the doorstep, this time — had trailed blood in. Or maybe, blood had trailed him. 
Dankovsky rummaged through his bag for something he could give Burakh, whose movement looked stunted by weakness. He found a bottle of milk, which he’d half-drunk already, directly from it; he couldn’t let Burakh do the same — possible contagion and all, obviously. He gathered the bottle, a glass, and a quarter of an apple — which he had cut, with a knife, off the rest, so Burakh could have it as it was. 
Burakh blearily, tiredly looked at the offerings, then at Dankovsky. At Dankovsky, then the offerings.

“Are you sure you won’t need these later?”
“I am sure of nothing, Burakh,” — and this was true — “except that you look like you could use them now, right now, and I don’t.”

So Burakh took the offered meager snacks, took them real gently, in his big hands, as if afraid the glass would shatter at his touch, or something. He nibbled at the apple for what felt like hours, eating slowly to enjoy the treat for longer, under Dankovsky’s dutiful watch that he did not waste it. He let out a comical sound of satiation after drinking the milk, and Dankovsky snorted. 

“Nothing like a glass of milk before bed, you know, oynon?”
“Isn’t it usually drunk warm, at night?”
“Oh, would you have heated it up for me?”
“Let’s not go that far,” Dankovsky scrunched his nose, and Burakh let out an exhale — as strong and loud of a laugh as he could manage, in his state.

As Burakh curled up in the bed and rolled on his side so as to face the wall, Dankovsky remembered his strangled voice, his haunt-white face. Words hanged at gallows high in his throat for the crime of not being quite lies, but not being quite truths either. 

     He waited for Burakh to settle, for the tension to ebb off his shoulders. For his breath to grow softer and easy, but not too soft as to indicate sleep.

“You’re hiding something from me.”
“I sure am, erdem.”

Dankovsky’s ears perked up — his nape itched with the unfamiliar name. Wariness chimed behind his eyes, agitated by the wind of word. It was not that he never thought of the steppe folks calling him a dipshit in a tongue he couldn’t understand (and the more time passed, the more he felt it was deserved, at least a bit), but Burakh had no use — anymore/for now — for insults, and the vocative sounded too affable in his mouth to be one anyways. 

“It is the first time you’ve called me this. What does it mean?”

Burakh stayed put for a second, and Dankovsky thought he had fallen fast asleep. Eventually, he craned his neck back and the Bachelor caught the twinkle in his tired eye, the twitch of his mouth. 

“If I tell you then it’s no fun, is it?”
“Oh, insulting me under my own roof, are we?” Dankovsky replied in kind. 

(It was disingenuous to call it “his” roof, it was not his, it was not even his — amiable — female host’s; it was, well, he feared he knew what it belonged to, but would not say he knew who. But that wouldn’t make for as funny of a sentence, now would it?) Burakh laughed. Dankovsky shivered with the breath of pride that hummed down his spine at having cheered up a man who, not even an hour earlier, had come in with death on his face and unspeakable weariness behind it.

“It’s no insult, erdem. It’s a title of respect for scholars, scientists — yeah, that type of people.”
“And you respect me?”

Burakh rolled from his side to his back. Dankovsky noticed how his arm didn’t move much, his hand weighing heavy between his body and the wall; it seemed to shield his flank and chest from the conversation, to protect the front (or the facade) of him. I could psychoanalyze you, colleague, the Bachelor thought about saying, before Freud’s face flashed before his eyes and he reeled a grimace in. 
Burakh swirled his face around so his eyes, this mossy blue hounded by an exhausted light pink around and purple below, caught Dankovsky’s like a fish-hook. 

“I do, erdem. I’d have fucked right off if I didn’t.”

Oh, you would have. And reciprocally, Dankovsky would have told him to fuck off if he himself didn’t either. Similia similibus curantur — similia similibus intelleguntur, similia similibus adiuvantur. Why make an enemy of a man so willing to help, so helpful at all? Beyond even his consent to shoulder him, Dankovsky found Burakh agreeable. Neither a flatterer nor a thorn in his side, no barrier and no honeyed liar either, the Bachelor found in this Haruspex an equal. And this was rare enough occurrence that he praised the Fates, and thanked the Fates, and asked them to please, not fuck this up for him, and not let him fuck it up for himself. Lakesis, Fate-allotting, don’t you let the fool of him trap himself in the thread you dole. But let me entangle myself in Burakh’s, for he is a good fellow, good enough of a doctor to be of aid, and sympathetic to my efforts. 

The Bachelor sat at the desk. As Burakh was sleeping, he took off his gloves, and scratched the back of his hands, and scratched, and scratched. 

     Burakh had something to do. Burakh had somewhere to go. He got up upon shy morning, patted Dankovsky’s shoulder gently, insisted he take the bed he’d just left. Oh, no need to beg him — Dankovsky crawled right in. 
Burakh had slept atop the blankets, so beneath them was not as hot as was the quilt, but the bed was pleasantly warm nonetheless. 
It smelled of Burakh — of dirt-sand, a high-pitched, warm, shrill scent, reminiscent of yellow spices, summery, dry; under that, a layer smelled of herbs, mellow and floral, bitter at the edges, like a foreign variety of mint, of thyme, of tangy sage; underneath lay the scent of clay, autumnal, damp, petrichoral; and beneath all, underlying Burakh’s characteristic trail, at its core, at the heart of it, pearl-in-the-shell of it, was the smell of blood. Coppery, patined. Bronze and silver-fragranced like the lingering odor of a coin kept in a clammy hand. Faint smell of sweat, and something sea-salty. 

Bachelor Dankovsky didn't know what got Burakh to wake up so early, and to run so fast. He had booked it for the south-east, which meant very little, as so much was this way. 
Born there was deepest, darkest vein of the Gorkhon, the one that appeared on no map and bled underground like a snake under the flesh, looped around the dormant Stillwater like the rope of a lasso, or a noose; around Dankovsky who didn't sleep well, and hadn't for days. 
He’d need to ask, or maybe Burakh would tell him. He hoped he’d find out soon. 

.❊.

What kind of story was this — 
where everything happened off-stage? 
Iphigenia’s murder, Clytemnestra’s rage,
Showing ending, never artifice. 

Bachelor runs, Bachelor batters earth
sent flailing day-after-day ‘cross town
Bachelor grows restless in his berth, 
Feels like the only sane one around. 

Reading between the lines —
where story develops —
Bachelor digs ground like maddened swines
For the meat-pieces of slaughtered Pelops. 

Butcher Tantalus was punished with desire —
Getting always so close, and yet so far —
Nights of madness mar —
Bachelor seeks, he-scryer. 

In the face of this, of what, what is it; 
No tool works! Try divination! Violence! Haruspicy! 
Kill! or think of killing — see if it does anything —
Hear drums! Dirge! Wailing! No wind on the high sea! 
Think and grow — heart like a bitter pit. 

.❊.

     Well, well, Dankovsky. Taunt and tempt the devil, and here’s he.  
You’ve gone door to door looking for the sick and the dead; and now, whatever it is, it knocks at the iron gates of your head. 

     What cometh there, beating loud and dry? The hooves of Conquest, of Pestilence; perhaps a heart at all. Through the floorboards, the wallpapered sidings, it is loud but mute, it tells no tale; which is only marginally better than if it did.

     The Pest enters through a hole; all illnesses do. Minuscule cuts or open wounds, mouth, nose, eyes, ears, urethral meatus. The Pest finds the holes of the inside, the organic pores of the lungs, the heart, the brain, the mind. Whatever hole it does find, the Pest weaves itself in; it enters like black thread does the eye of a pin, wetted sickly. It presses against the lips of the wound it had found; it pushes into the flesh still intact around it, and cuts through like the sharpest of knives does meat. It cuts an opening so thin one does not notice it until it falls agape like a howling mouth, and pours blood like a pierced lung, poked spleen, putrid intestine. 

Illness is at home in his body; it likes the rot that it finds. 

[Parodos for one man, the one man that’s left standing.]

     The creaking. The creaking. The creaking, the breathing; the coming-closer, the running-away. The ebbing the flowing. Whatever it is, it is a bird in flight. Taking off—no, no, taking. Taking what it can; stealing. The creaking, the breathing, the coming-closer. Crow vulture magpie thief carrion. It’s a bird in flight. It’s coming closer — now it’s inside. Bachelor, it’s inside(s). Your own are boiling; your spirit inside boiling alive. Milk on the stove. Blood milk on the stove. Water in the kettle, whistling. Whistling, screaming, a long loud string of untethered wailing. It is outside. Outside is boiling, inside is boiling. Doesn’t it make you feel whole for once? at once? feel hole — through the chest, pierced, the lungs cave in, you’re coughing. Through the hole. Mouth. Spitting. Blood on the lip, boiling. Outside and inside in harmony. Creaking. Heaving. Heavy. The croak. The crow. The omen. The bird-in-flight. A bird on two legs that walks. It’s faster than you. It’s followed you. 
Sit. Stand. Lie down. Lie down. Lie. Lie. Lie. Lie and say it’s the exhaustion. The bones boil in the milkwater-blood. Sick to the marrow. Sick-sucked-sickened dry. Bled out. The ebbing. The high tide. The drowning. The Bachelor lies down and goes to sleep. He’s kept the pants and the vest. 

[Parodos for one man, the one man that’s left standing.]

     Illness comes in through the front of the throat, knife, and Dankovsky would have laughed bitterly remembering it is where lands the sacrificial blade on the necks of tragic maidens — derê, which is the white front of throat, derê, δέρη, with a deep open vowel at its tail, throat-vowel open the same, agape like one hails, ê, ê, η, a vowel shaped like a leap down, leap of faith leap of suicide, η like one screams or screams out as they bleed, as they gargle, he'd have laughed if he could, η this loud theatral scream and then it jumps off, it dies. How much he'd like to gargle, spit, bleed, something, but his throat is dry, sand-dry, AH! got him! sand-throated white-throated, parched throat like a parchment dirtied and dirtied and dirtied again by palimpsests, under which the white paper of throat caves in and tears, that don't make it out of his mouth. 
There is screaming and singing outside, the chorus, the female chorus which does not wail for him. They don't wail, they don't even seem to mourn, or maybe they mourn so often that nobody can decipher screams of grief from screams of living (and in what way would these two be exclusive?).

[Parodos for one man, the one man that’s left standing; the women outside can join in too. But why should they? He’s torn. He’s thorn. He’s tearer-of-throne.]

the heartbeat. the heartbeat. the heartbeat. 
the heart

beat

the great painful nothing between
diastole and systole

the heartbeat. even slower than the previous one. the great painful nothing between diastole and systole. 
the heartbeat. 
backwards ← going ← clock ← the
↓
just so illness can slither → between → its hands
once more, angrier this time, stronger than the gods’ snakes around Dankovsky’s chest and crushing. 

heartbeat felt in the left lung               heartbeat felt in the right lung
|
a
long
line
that is a burning sprawl
down
the
Bachelor’s
body
some kind of
open
autopsy
cut
into which pain slithers
and sighs. 
(Yes, this is where the Bachelor’s heart would be.
The line cuts clean through it.)

The ebbing and flowing pains of the illness trail and trek and pilgrimage through every thread of muscle, every strand of hair, every taken — or rather stolen — breath, seep through the pores of the skin like blood through gauze. 
The soft buzzing, such as of wasps, or of electricity. Fragile, flailing like a wing, friable. Current(s). Carence. Currency. Presen(t)(ts)(ce)(ces). Then the psalms started. 

     The plague speaks psalms the plague speaks in psalms like shapes and shape-shifting(s) like vers(atil)e alexandrine. 
The plague speaks (in) psalms is it like this for everybody else? For anybody else? Does the plague speak (in) the same honeyed wickedness, the softsweet lies? Does it hook a finger a nail through the same wound? Does the plague for everyone samely slither, snake? (Nominative, vocative.)
The Bachelor knows not how she whispers to others, but to him she says: Book of Daniel, the lions’ bite is forever sweeter than mine, but mine is true, mine is kind, cruel, cruelkind like other things are sweetbitter. 

The spirit sang whispered prayed pleaded begged. Death does not beg. This is something entirely different. 

     He felt more than he heard Burakh, the twins, maybe Rubin or Eva pace up the stairs, but never down, as if they vanished into air or dust at the view of him. Felt them, yes, their words the psalms, the soft buzzing. Ringing through him with a dry echo, as if he’d been hollowed out. Felt them, yes, the weight of their measured steps upon his chest (hollowed out, caved in) as upon the floorboards, as if he was the floorboards, as if he was just like this house (is it a house?), intestines of twisted stairs, hair of pillow down, skin patterned with rashes and bruises and cuts stretched upon the walls, visited, haunted, paced, restless. Turned upon itself as the foundations sink in sand. A house for Death not to inhabit, but to peel off the wallpapers of and cover itself in its fires’ soot, to laugh in the corridors of and let itself echo endlessly. 
What was the point of this?
Hollowness, echo, psalms, spirits. Corner of house. Cornered in house. In/within himself. Vessel for illness in the way the Stillwater was vessel for… Even if he could still think, he wouldn’t want to think about it. 
Electricity. A shiver, a shake, a current. A current - a river - a flood. Blood in it like in everything else. He coughs it up and falls back, limp, on the red-soiled pillow. Red color clay color blood, color clay again. 
The illness was supposed to stay clear of the strong and courageous, was it not? 
What a way to find he was weak and a coward. Oh, how adversity makes a man see himself for himself. Bachelor, he-scryer, he-inside-scryer, did not like what he found. 

And so this was how the world ended. No thunder, no seals, no trumpets. It was comforting, and yet quite lame just the same.
(It came to him; wasn’t it a bit presumptuous to think of one's own death as the end of the world? But as he closed his eyes, he remembered the world outside, and told himself that yes, this was how the world ended. With an agonizing, guttural groan as it folded upon itself to try to keep the pain contained, and a whisper.

Chapter Text

     The house, house sitting-besides-itself house all-see(i)n(g) watched on/in as Haruspex choephoros, the libation-bearer, crawled up to the attic. Isn’t it bad luck to bring libations to the living? What’s luck got to do with it? Hey — what’s the living got to do with it? Will you shut it — the door behind you, as well — and see, what did Burakh choephoros bring? It’s wet and red. It’s in a tiny vial. It stinks of blood-dripping slaughter, as the translators have said — this smell is known, it isn’t of animals. Artemy choephoros brought his hand — to the Bachelor’s head, forehead, fore-rampart upon which vigil’ed a nervous wrinkle. Artemy choephoros spilled not the slaughter-ichor on the quilt, damp with febrile sweat. Oh, he’s so careful. He opened the burial mound of Dankovsky’s face, he opened his burial-mouth. He brought the neck of the vial to the lips, dry as packed funeral dirt, and spilled in. He closed the burial-mouth with his own hand over the gap. He waited and heard as the Bachelor breathed, heaved, sickeningly sweet scent washing into the cup of the Haruspex’s hand. There was a swallowing noise. 

     Comes Cassandra's lament, her dirge, doomed seer, cometh her otototoi, wailing, wet of fear; tototoi muffled like the ticking of a clock, a clock somewhere, a clock above, a clock inside, inside the house, below, the level below, or below directly, altar above the martyrial grave inverted. 
Hand (of clock) sent after hand (of clock), in the same way murder was made. 

Time drifts upon the Kokytos where the tears of the dead go to fill Fate’s cup; where the exhausted, bitter, weary sobs of the bitterer living pool on its shores. Burakh wipes his face with his hand. He shakes it; it rains inside, on his own shoes. 

Time drifts upon the Phlegethon, fire-flaming, the febrile river-son. The fever goes down.   

The Bachelor pities the Styx and its purpleblue waters but he does not pity its drowned, its damned, its dice-played dismal depths. The Bachelor is Styx pitied sent across the dark plains the Bachelor is Charon, miserable Charon, useless coins clinking in his damp pockets, damned coins. The calm waters are a pestilence-purple bruise-purple bruise-pestilence and Persephone, daughter of the Earth, is Plague. Daughter of Earth, is Plague. 

Reason gives life to man. Reason distinguishes man from animal. The Bachelor wakes up only half-living, yes, but a half-living man.  

.❊.

     The Bachelor’s on a blank page. This is not unusual; he’s been there before, he’ll be there again, in another time, another place. He sees the story unravel like the wreathings of fate, of Ariadnê’s thread, her nooserope. He knows how the story ends (better than you, better than I… for now). 

A Bachelor must’ve died, or must’ve been left on the other side of illness-as-Styx; one that Dankovsky cannot even (ap)prehend from across the Lethe. Like tripleheaded, dogheaded Helen who was at once in Sparta, in Illion, in Egypt, and whose only phantasm was left to the grasp, Bachelor is at once in Tartarus; in the swaying pirogue of Charon, bloodobole in mouth, below tongue; here, right here, in this bloodsullied bed, and not feeling too incarnate either — in-carnus, he feels awfully meat, the hanged-and-hooked kind, without even the decency of a godstone to be slaughtered on.
The Bachelor’s at a crossroads, knotted root of infinite branches, hollowed-out where evil lies (meaning twofold) in wait; a threshold where it is unlucky to say goodbye, but perhaps even more to say hello. 

Drop the knife. Invite the guest. The house is full, the house fills-swells-gorges with blood. Houselung pierced the spleen seeps black. The house seeps black, he thinks he can see it through the floorboards. It is rising; smokes, vines, whatever it is, that evil. Every knot in the wood a crossroad. Who laid these floors? The softest breath makes them creak. Pulse is felt through. Bachelor knows such a story. 
The Bachelor’s at the beginning of the story, again, even though he already was there before. Ariadnê, soon the waters of Crete will rise red and putrid, slither omensnakes into the labyrinth, and the soft wool of your thread will dissolve like the loose knit of gauze untying itself from its complexities. Everything is complex, nothing is complicated. Such go the stories. 

Ariadnê, at least when things went so wrong, you could have hanged yourself with your thread — it would have been easier, you are only as heavy as ink and paper. But the Bachelor, the Bachelor is flesh. What an unfortunate, cruel thing for him to be. 

     Thread loops itself ‘round thread, ‘round throat, derê again, di(c)e-throw. Thread tight, thread-tourniquet. Word bleeds out like a butchered animal. Burakh butcher libations-bearer comes again. Nekuia that unravels. How loud was his calling for Dankovsky to crawl out of the land of the dead? Loud enough, one must suppose, because he opens his eyes, and it’s morning. Bleary, bluegreen, devileyed and diseaseskinned morning, swollen with impious corpsesmoke, but morning. 

“Hey,” Burakh called him. Called him so low and breathy ‘twas like he hadn’t used his voice in days. And maybe indeed he hadn’t. Are words spoken off-stage words at all? 

Dankovsky could only gargle grossly as a response, but it meant something regardless. 

     He was cranky. His legs, his back, his flank hurt. He got up; he was risen. Not fully awake yet, still dragging death after him, but he was risen. 
Dankovsky looked into the mirror, and did not recognize the ghoul staring back. Looked like shit. This had been a shared state between him and Burakh, almost for as long as they'd known each other, looking like shit. In the other’s presence, no less.
He had a pink halo around the collar where spat blood had seeped through the cloth and been washed, its ghost like a noose across his throat; grey sweat stains in the pits of his heavy, leaden arms, wound stains as dark as pitted cherries across his flank and in the hollow of his shoulder. Under his sleeve, the dressing was lifting off. 

“I should have redone your bandage,” Burakh interrupted his thoughts, “but I didn’t want to fiddle with your shirt and underclothes without you having had a warning.”
“Much appreciated, Burakh.”
“Was afraid you’d start flailing and punch me across the jaw.”
“Oh… that…”

Dankovsky opened more buttons of his shirt. Then, some button of the top of his underclothes. Pulled to the side, trying to assess how bad it needed redoing. 

“Well,” Burakh mumbled, “I’ll leave you to it.”
“Going out?”
“No. Downstairs.”
Dankovsky chuckled: “Too afraid I’ll collapse to leave me to my lonesome?”

Burakh stilled in the doorway. He threw Dankovsky a glance, then walked away. Ah. So he was.

     Either the water was ice-cold, or Dankovsky was still nursing a fever. Regardless, it felt heavenly as he cleaned off his shoulder, his flank wound; with a sponge patting wet the sutures which he hurriedly dried afterwards. Man, he’d have sighed in pleasure. He might have looked ridiculous, with the upper half of his union suit wide open and hanging behind him like shrugged-off suspenders, but he felt like a new man. 
And he was, and he was. 

Burakh walked back upstairs. In a small saucer, he balanced a full cup of tea. Dankovsky watched him approach, an interrogative eyebrow making his way across his forehead. He shrugged his underclothes back on and re-buttoned his shirt.
Whatever it was, it smelled really good. The scent of black tea leaves was dull, a bit dusty, bitter, but lightened up with hints of cinnamon, cloves, honey. Somethings else, earthy, vetiver, fern, mugwort. A thick, creamy scent lingered on top like seafoam — a drop of milk. Burakh handed him the cup. The exchange was careful, Burakh’s hands moving below the saucer to catch it, were Dankovsky to drop it. As he brought the drink closer to his face, Burakh’s hands came closer too, apparently nervous about the way Dankovsky’s shook. 

“... Where did you get these leaves and spices from?” Dankovsky asked.
“Most of it is black tea I pulled from Lara’s cupboards,” Burakh admitted. “I've also added some herbs… from my collection.”
“So it is these notes I thought I smelled… Some sorts of gentle twyres that do not do one’s head in and instead flavor teas?” Dankovsky mused.
Burakh shrugged. “All twyres can be gentle, erdem. What matters is how you behave towards them as you process the plant — it yields soft to soft touch, it yields wicked to wicked.”
“Consider myself flattered you’d call me this, even in my sorry state,” Dankovsky said as he blew on his drink (for he did not want to focus on the way Burakh had said “gentle”, himself this, unconsciously so — he spoke tenderly of his herbs, in a way that made Daniil’s heart sting). 
“You’re still a knowledgeable man even on your worst days, you know.”

He had opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out of it. His eyes darted off, he was thinking. Closed his mouth lest something stupid come out of it. It dawned upon Dankovsky: 

“... Do you think I’m more knowledgeable because I’ve gotten sick?”
“No, not because you’ve gotten sick — because you’ve gotten sick, stayed sick for over two days, and came out of it alive. Something must have happened.”

Something did. 
Dankovsky laughed to himself bitterly: he had seen the beyond, as did the dancers the children were so passionately discussing, some odd three, five, ten, a hundred days ago… 

“You can finish this,” Dankovsky handed the cup back to Burakh. “It is delicious, really, but I don’t feel like drinking something so sweet after what I’ve just handled.”
“I didn’t think it was that sweet…”
“It is not. You’ve done well. The problem’s with me.”

Burakh heard and listened, then smiled self-congratulatingly, and Dankovsky didn’t even mind. 

“Tinctures and teas, well, it’s just the same,” he whistled. 
“Equally good remedies,” Dankovsky added. 

Burakh turned to him. His gaze had hardened. Dankovsky’s did too, before dropping to the floor, that his blood had stained. He wished. They wished. 

“How long was I out for?” Dankovsky croaked. 
“Something like fifty hours,” Burakh replied, and Dankovsky felt his heart tumble to the floor, through his stomach and intestines. Fifty hours! Fifty hours wasted, wasting, fifty hours where he let Burakh wrangle this damned pestilence alone! “... That's incredible, oynon,” Burakh continued on, whispering. “I haven't seen a single one of the sick who recovered after this long. Did you… do anything?”
“Please, spare me,” Dankovsky begged weakly. “The only thing worse for a miraculé is to be asked how they brought the miracle upon themselves.”
“Мира— what?”
“It’s French.”
“I gathered.”

Fifty fucking hours… He had never even slept a third this long! 

“Was I... always unconscious?”
“No. Which seemed even worse than if you were.” Burakh fell silent. He hesitated. He searched for incitation in the Bachelor’s eyes, for an acknowledgement that his elaboration was expected. Dankovsky could not give it to him — he didn’t know if he wanted him to elaborate. But Burakh did anyway: “You coughed. You hacked. You thrashed around. You looked like you could sweat through the fabric of your shirt. You spat blood, I had to wipe your mouth with your own tie.” Burakh scratched the back of his neck, visibly embarrassed. “... I'm sorry, by the way.”
“At least it is still red.”
“Meager consolation, oynon…”
“Hey, it is not your tie. Do not worry yourself with it in my stead.”

Dankovsky disliked this image in his mind, of Burakh tending to him. He could so clearly see himself tending to the sick, this worry, this heartbeat, this jerking of the patient, the half-dead, the unconscious flailing, kicking, the trails of blood-spit. He shook his head. Quick, something to lighten up the atmosphere…

“I missed seeing you tend to me?” he mused, with what he could manage of a smile on the lips. “How regrettable.”
“Don't tease me, Bachelor,” Burakh frowned. 

Burakh had opened his mouth to continue, but stopped himself straight away. He didn't close it, he played it ajar as if the words were gusts of winds playing with its open doorway. Eventually, he pinched his lips. His brows were furrowed. He was pensive.
He had meant — you would have done the same for me.
This took Dankovsky a second to register. He thought about it. He watched Burakh as he stood, posture tense, hunched at the neck from fatigue and strain. He looked at his long body, at his arms that were skinny in places where a man his size shouldn't be, as his features hollowed by exhaustion and hunger. Could Dankovsky imagine him, bedbound, pale, burning, agitated? His lips dry, open and closing on wheezing coughs, eyes veiled a thin layer of illnessmist?
He could, so vividly he flinched. So vividly he felt like if he reached his arm out for Burakh’s face, he would contaminate him where he stood, right then.
But Dankovsky didn't let himself think too long about reaching for Burakhs face. He shouldn't have even a little bit at all. Because yes, he would have. He would have done the same, that is — what he wouldn't have done is admit it to himself. Confessions are only torn out of one by someone else's hands. And his being torn out of him by Burakh's, well... all things considered, he would quite like that.
The thought spooked him like a febrile shadow does a horse and he flinched. Burakh noticed, but only raised an eyebrow.

Gentlemen don't think about these things.
(Gentlemen think about way worse, in the privacy of rooms borrowed to ghosts, who may or may not have thought these same kinds of things.)

     Dragging his feet back to the desk, Dankovsky spotted the empty vial on it. A compact cylindrical shape, the glass-walls of it were streaked, inside, of red clot-smears. The cork at its neck had not been pushed back in after use. Approaching, Dankovsky caught a whiff of its peculiar scent — of gore, pungently so, copper, iron, weapon-like, dampened with the sweet smell of unknown spices. 

“Burakh, what is this? What was this?”
Burakh approached. “... This is what I gave you. Some… four, five hours ago.”
It dawned on the Bachelor. “Then I woke up.”
“You did.”
“Burakh, this is the cure.”
“As far as I know.”

Dankovsky took a step back — he had to. The enormity of the thing had struck him across the face, dragged him under like a groundswell, thrown him up over the seafoam. By the fates, he could see light. So this was how Icarus had felt — may his own mind and his own hand and his own behavior keep him from a same end. Then he felt his face drain itself of blood. 

“Burakh, you spent all of this on me?”
“I was not not going to. We can’t afford to lose one more doctor, oynon.” As Dankovsky opened his mouth to protest — for fuck’s sake, you could have probably split one vial amongst multiple people! You’ve got kids in your care, don’t you? Surely they could have used this—divided by two, by three or four amongst the smallest, what a damn waste, Burakh, I’m not even sure I wanted to be there anymore! — Burakh interrupted: “I cannot make the discoveries you do. You cannot make those I do. We wouldn’t have been too many of four doctors, were my father still alive — you could’ve brought a whole team with you from the Capital and we still would be understaffed.” 

As he paused to catch his breath, Dankovsky slipped his words in:

“So what I understand is, that you’ve given it to me because you believe my future acts will make up for this waste.”
Oh, this pissed Burakh off. His nose crinkled. His wide mouth pinched and his jaw clenched. “Is everything about mathematical equations to you?”
“Not everything—”
“I’ve given the cure to you in a bet on the future. Because if you don’t bet on it, there won’t be one.”

Oh, how Dankovsky didn’t like the future that was shaping itself. The fog-denseness of things to come stank of burning. And he hadn’t even met the Inquisition yet. 
He couldn’t deal with earnestness, or rather, not with Burakh’s. He recognized on him the traits of the tender (from verb tending)-to-the-sick. These hollowed cheeks, these sloped shoulders. These hands that twitched with need to do something, anything. How does one deal with the earnestness he cannot deal with? He makes a stupid joke. 

“Are you perhaps concerned about me?” he taunted, a smirk distorting his tired face. 
“Sure,” Burakh said, with that raspiness of sleep scraping the shape of the word. 

Dankovsky fell silent, finding himself dumb. 

“... Are you surprised?” Burakh raised an eyebrow in turn. “Is that surprising to you? Do people not care about each other in the Capital?”

Dankovsky turned to the window, where he thought Burakh couldn’t see him (but the world could, and it was fine, because he’d rather deal with it than with him, now) and grimaced. He didn’t see how Burakh kept raising his eyebrows in tired bewilderment.

“Depends on the crowd.”
“I don’t quite make a crowd, do I?” Soft, again. Trying to mellow Dankovsky out of his defenses. A hand outstretched, offered, which Dankovsky felt the urge to bat away. 

Dankovsky turned to him instead. 

“What… is it?”
“What is?”
“The cure.”
“Ah. It’s a mix of a tincture and… blood…”
“I could have guessed, I saw it.”
“I’m cautious because I don’t exactly know what it is, erdem.”

Dankovsky felt the shock of incomprehension. Oh, this was the worst-case scenario — the miracle slipping from the miracle-maker’s hands.

“How so?”
“I’m not sure you’d believe me if I told you.”
“Oh, come on, Burakh, after all I’ve—” been through, which you haven't seen, because it happened off-stage for you, but not for me; I’ve felt all the lights across the proscenium, burning, slithering into each pore and setting fire to the dull down of what I had been made into, it’s cracked the clay of the skin that was my mask—
“You’ve done a lot, I understand, thank you, I owe you, I’m aware,” Oh, this is not what I was about to go on about! “But I need… More time to figure it out. Figure… something important out. Then, I’ll tell you.”

He scratched the back of his head, as if pawing at the thought there. 

“I need to… go through with the experimentation phase of this hypothesis I have.”

Dankovsky almost laughed. He would have, were his throat not bound with remnants of sickness, and this underlying fear, this slow simmer in his blood.

“Thank you for your work, Burakh. I know we don’t always get to shoulder each other out there, elsewhere than in that damned Theatre, but I see the work you do.”
“Reciprocally, erdem. Do not mention the cure again. It’s on the house.”

Oh, how he was afraid he’d make Burakh regret this. 
He didn’t want to, nor did he want to think he would. But he knew himself well enough to know he might make Burakh regret it. He knew how such stories went.
 

.❊.

     He dragged his feet to the Cathedral, which the Inquisition had requisitioned. What a peculiar place for them to choose. How ironic.
Peeker, peeper, all-watcher. Angels in that they saw everything, and divine in that they never did anything to stop it. Until they did, in which case divinity sloughed off them like an ill-fitting costume. 
Who had they sent, this time? Orff? Phylin or Karminsky, cruel as the gods were, because they sought to imitate them, believed the uniform erected them to such roles? There existed gods of fate, of judgement, of justice, of birth, death and sickness, none of which Dankovsky believed in, but which it exasperated him that the Inquisitors might work under, might believe themselves to work under them regardless. Same way he did not believe in the same god his mother did, and hated priests anyways. 
Death, which he followed, which he hunted maybe more fervently than it hunted him — because, for now, he was not dead! and fates know it had had quite the chance to scythe him! — was no god, no watcher, it needed no priesthood. All it needed was time and terrain, and with his work, his Thanatica, this was precisely what the Bachelor tried to starve it from. 

The Inquisition was slower than Death — which made it easier, which made it harder. The Inquisition's pawns (or rather rooks) were human women and men, with all the flesh it implied, with all the Death it implied. The Inquisition waited on Death's heel, still vulnerable to its crushing, yet it appeared as if it could direct Death's stride, if for a turn, if for just a turn. 
Death was less inevitable than the Inquisition, which itself was less inevitable than Death. Is it stopping to make sense yet? Both were clad of black.
Dankovsky would choose Death as a foe anytime. 

One of Dankovsky’s lab partners in Thanatica, his Thanatica, his beloved walled city he (had) longed to return to — he felt in wait of the seer’s omen, who would he have to kill to be allowed back home, for the winds to blow in his white wings-sails? — had been a German immigrant, face marred of mensur scars, whom t’was joked about that he had come to the Capital to follow an old flame, or a young love — truth was he had followed a Königsbergian classmate of his, a secretive, nervous man who had apparently been swallowed whole by the city, but Dankovsky hadn’t doubted both of these things were true at once. A pearl of wanting in the shell of Death, a story nestled within a story, between the lines of the story. Off-stage, indeed, where Dankovsky didn’t know what happened — and it was none of his business; and gentlemen didn’t think about such things, especially not with longing. 
(Except when they did — off-stage, off-page, for they didn’t dare say it out loud.)

     And, well, from the Inquisitor’s mouth, it was gone. Herald on the rampart, that she-raven was — carrion and death-carrier equally. She told not of the beacons of victory across the sea. She told of the sack, the siege, and the shattering. 

.❊.

     Came to him in visions more than in dreams the mementos of battles against Death that lined the cabinets and shelves of the laboratory, now won again by Death itself, risen from ashes back to ashes just to taunt him one last time. He thought of the specimens, preserved in vials and jars, transient, transcendent, tranquil in restful forevernesses; of the glass that fire punctures through, melts from the inside like illness eats at living tissue; of the formaldehyde cocoons of the specimens seeping, oozing, bleeding out of the cracks, the sterile stillness of preservation made viscous, wet, un-prehensible again. Life, like Death, and Death, like Life, slipping through the lines of the hand.

It had made sense to Dankovsky that Death be Cold, Death be Ice. Everything fit — the winters whose howling blizzard tore the lost and the unfortunate to pieces, trapped them in fogs that slowly froze them to their bones; the coldness of cadaveric skin, tense, taunt, thin as a first-frost sheet of ice over the bone; the tranquil silences of mausoleums, the stone of which was always always frigid and dry. It had made sense — maybe it still did. But at least, at least tonight, Dankovsky thought of Death as Fire. 

Dankovsky undid his cravat, took off his vest, pulled the tucked shirt from his pants and shrugged it off like a cape; kicked off his shoes, opened his belt and let his pants fall limp at his ankles. He took off the garters that left persistent marks around his shins and calves. He went to bed and felt like he was sinking through. 
Outside, the pyres were going. He had to leave the window ajar for the stuffy, oppressive air of the attic to filter out, and smoke snaked through the opening like an infection past the lips of a wound. It was heady with the smells of burning herbs, acrid with the fumes of varnish as houses were gutted and their insides put to scorch, sickening with the stench of the smoldering of fat, flesh and marrow. 

     He had stood. He had snaked out of his covers, crawled sleepwalker to the window, from which he could see the tower. He stared, now. Cold in his underclothes, the drafts of outside permeating through the boards like snowpiercers, climbing up his legs like vines. Felt goosebumps, the hairs rise. His chest struggled to do the same, he found himself bursting out sharp gasps of breathlessness. 
The tower outside — the miracle still left standing. So much had been said. He was not a believing man, not anymore, but, fuck, was he hopeful, in the face of it, of everything left of it. So he did not have anything to go home to. His life’s work, in flames. What about the people inside? In flames, perhaps, too. He retched. He felt a gross and grotesque sob twist his throat in a knot and he thought he’d vomit. 
It was as if the Capital had been wiped off the map with a war he hadn’t even seen, and could not even mourn the dead of — the dead, his Thanatica, how so bitterly funny it was that he couldn’t even bury it. What was left for him at the Capital? His work, destroyed. His apartment, this small one-and-half room that had once been a servant’s quarters or a maid’s room, was just a vessel for his work, for him entranced in his work. The watering hole some two streets down, somewhat ill-famed from its brawls, had been his refuge to put together research, finish piecing together some hypotheses, here in a corner, protected from prying eyes by at least two men beating the shit out of each other and drawing the gendarmes’ attention onto them instead. The faculty had been training grounds. Its get-togethers rhetorical jousts, as were the parties. 
Well, most of them. 

He remembered one. Andrey had found something out about him early on; he had a keen nose for such things, or whatever the sensible organ one had to uncover androphiles amongst the general male population was. 
Dankovsky remembered — Andrey had brought his brother to one of the get-togethers, once that he could recall. So indeed — Peter had met him, but he hadn’t met Peter. The man had probably gotten Dankovsky’s name from Andrey, but Dankovsky had not gotten Peter’s. It had not mattered — he hadn’t approached. He had tucked himself in a corner and watched. He hadn't looked prying, preying, or prowling; he'd looked taller than he was because his neckline dove so low upon his thorax, drawing the white bladeshape of his throat and chest; he’d stood like a big great bird in a nest of shadows. There was little permeability between the Faculty of Medicine and the Academy of Arts, and very rarely did the students openly mingle; permeable were the desires of men seeking the company of other men, though, and beyond the gap stretching between them from their scholarly pursuits, they would meet nonetheless and not talk about these things. There were many more men from the Faculty than from the Arts in these soirees, which Dankovsky found somewhat amusing — their branch was not the one stereotyped to harbor those of unusual inclinations. (With a little more thought, it came to Dankovsky's mind that maybe the unusually-inclined of the Academy sought less the secrecy of these organized soirees, for they already felt themselves freer, unbound because already out-of-bounds, already flirting with the margins of society from their pursuits. Maybe it was the hush-hush, the secrets-keepers, those who had an imagined, wished future to lose who gathered past drawn curtains, regardless of how loud they were behind. Then he had thought, why then would Andrey be there? Then he had thought, because he wasn’t the kind to pass up any opportunity life threw in his stride.)

Men would play cards with each other by pairs, tarot, poker; Andrey (half-)joked that they were playing and betting on who would (get to) fuck who. Dankovsky sat and didn't watch and didn't look, as if the playing of the cards was obscene (in) itself. He worked to undo himself, to sink in the chairs, letting his head roll back, his arms go limp and his shoulders slope. He approached no-one and didn't let any do the same, he let the waves of words, of laughter, of jokes batter him, cold comforting sea, let these depths he wished he could drown in carry him on rocks and shores. Sometimes, he fell asleep surrounded by sailors and shipwrecked ones just like himself. But more often than that, he wanted to hear the sound of the waves.

Why was he thinking about it all now? Well, because one only weeps for the past once he’s sure he cannot return to it. One lives in hope before the beacons across the sea light up, declaring the victory, declaring the destruction at once. There were no beacons. The pyres grew. His whole life had been thrown onto one, or perhaps more accurately, one had been thrown onto his life. Scorched earth. Oh, earth. Stank with bitter, headache-inducing twyre. And yet Dankovsky could not close the window. He heard footsteps and a silhouette was at the door. 

“Oh!” — Burakh, who jumped back seeing him there.
“Burakh.”
 “Sorry, I didn’t think—”
“You’re drenched in sweat. Have you run? Did you need something?”
“I have. And I, uh, just wanted to ask if I could crash here for the night.”
“Hunted?”
“You and I both, are we not?”

Dankovsky bitterly laughed. He threw a glance at Burakh, who held the door half-open so he could hide behind it, head still in view of Dankovsky to make sure he could tell he was not looking in. 

“Also — no knocking, Burakh?”
“Force of habit,” he mumbled. “There were… a few days… where I didn’t really need to warn you I was coming in.”

Fair, of course. 

“Give me a minute,” Dankovsky ordered.

From behind the half-closed, or half-open, depending on which way one saw it, door, Burakh nodded and waited. 

Dankovsky put his socks, and the garters back on. The metallic chiming of their clips reminded him of putting on a horse’s bridle — come on, Bachelor, you show-horse, he-destrier of neither Conquest, nor Death, nor Pestilence, a beast left loose and maddened, the empty stirrups beating his already-wounded flanks. He shrugged his shirt back on, tucked it into his pants. Graceless pushed his feet into his shoes, it hurt to bend to tie the laces. He could not care less about the vest. Could not care less about the cravat. They were damn red — had they always been this red? Gore-red, doom-red, grotesquely so. It sickened him to see such a color. He felt his veins empty, his arteries quite the same. As he stumbled forward as if his legs couldn’t keep holding him, Burakh hurried into the room and threw himself in front of him, catching him with extended arms, hands landing forcefully on his shoulders. Dankovsky barked in pain. 

“Sorry,” Burakh blurted out, and readjusted his left arm on Dankovsky’s shoulder. 
“No need. … You were keeping an eye on me, weren’t you?”
“I didn’t peep,” he huffed. 
“What does it matter now, anyways?”

Burakh didn’t reply. 
Silence fell onto the room, instead of into it — flattened space with his weight, crushed Dankosky’s shoulders too. Breath bled out of him in a rale. The denseness of matter in his shoulders, his arms, his chest, his throat and his head too, all sunk to the floor, pooling like blood, burdening his legs and feet with a weight of lead. He could not move. 

“It'll kill me,” Dankovsky spoke. He didn’t say what ‘it’ was. ‘It’ was so much he’d need a whole new story to unravel it; to decorticate, to autopsy, to find a pathology in the shape of himself in the corpse of it, a tumor in man’s shape, and yet he was the afflicted one, yet he was as close to killing himself as it was to killing him. Spoke so low, he wasn’t even sure Burakh could have heard it — which might have been better. But Burakh did, and replied:
“... We need you there.” Impersonal, but considerate enough that Dankovsky would have pushed him away, had he had the strength to.
“With each passing day it feels less and less true,” he retorted. His voice spooled out of the gap between his gritted teeth like the threads of fates did out of the hands of the Parcae. His breath clung to it, thready, sour with the taste of blood.

His head pounded. He was so hungry he felt on the verge of collapse, but his stomach was dead-silent. He wanted to bite onto something and chew, just so he didn’t bite off his own tongue. 
He maneuvered his body weight from his heels to his toes, just to see whether Burakh would let him fall or push him away. He did neither, the fool, fool that Dankovsky was more than him: instead he held him steady, strong; he bent his arms just a bit as Dankovsky’s head hung between them. Dankovsky swayed back on his heels, and Burakh dropped his arms. 
Disarmed, eh? Limbs loose at his sides, same as Dankovsky’s were. The Bachelor’s neck stretched at the back, where the cervical vertebrae felt elastic, the physics of the body only second to those of grief. 
He stared at Burakh’s boots, their mud stains, their blood stains, their water stains, small and pin-like drops on the toe box. Burakh’s face was dry, so those weren’t from water he’d had washed it with. Had it rained? 
He stared at the leather pouch that adorned the stomach of Burakh’s tunic. It was bulging with all sorts of things; Dankovsky could hear the clinking of glass, maybe more vials of that precious cure; smelled sweetly of some herbs, giving after their cutting a sugary scent; small rounded shapes, marbles or hazelnuts. 
Then, because the want came over him, and want, when hope is gone, when faith is gone, when strength is gone, when belief and ambition and courage are all gone — gone scythed, like the dead are, one after the other, bled dry like animals at a most cruel altar — is all that there’s left, he leaned closer. He put his forehead on Burakh’s chest, just underneath the buckle at the front of his leather hood. Felt, against his taut skin, under which headache simmered, the weft and warp of the tunic’s fabric. 

He watched Burakh’s hands — waited for them to do something. Pushing him away felt like the lucid option — and in a way, in some corner of him, secret yet loud, Dankovsky wanted him to: it would be the easy way out, it would be the meaningful one, it would be the logical one.
But Burakh was not a logical man. 
(This wasn’t even true. He was — just not in a way that the Bachelor understood.)
His hands… moved. Senselessly, somewhat. Rose, as if about to take hold of his arms to gently nudge him away. Flitted. Fell back down. Fists closed, once, twice — what, you wanna punch me, Burakh? Hands were shaken of whatever thought had pulsed through them. Dankovsky felt as Burakh exhaled, loud, slow, long — as if too sharp of a breath would have dislodged him, and maybe it would have. 

“I don't need you to embrace me back,” Dankosvky said, and it was true, need was not the verb that reigned over his spirit in this instant, because using the one that reigned would have made the sentence a lie. “Just... let me rest my head. Just a minute.”
“I will,” Burakh replied, and Daniil felt the words as they rumbled through his chest, under the skin and the tunic against which Dankovsky’s face was pressed. Sounded like a thunderstorm, out there, in the distance. “I know I don't need to, I just....”

He raised his hands again, an inverted v-shape with his arms, as if praying. What? Dankovsky took another look at the palms, which Burakh was obviously showing. Oh. Blood on them. He hadn’t even noticed. It made so much more sense that there be blood on them.

“I can't,” Burakh concluded.
“I do not think that it is you can’t,” Dankovsky whispered. Oh, dangerous thing to say. Dangerous thing to start. Poisonous of a fire. He was used to handling those — but only because he was to extinguishing others’. “You shouldn't, possibly. But I think you can.”

(This was true.) What was it, with Dankovsky, being almost as earnest as Burakh had been only when he could tease the other man about his actions, never reflecting on his own? (Well, oh my, that’d be because he was hiding stuff, and hiding stuff was only comfortable of a thing when one felt the other did too.)

“It’s going to be just fine,” Burakh spoke, slow, as soft as he could manage, which was not much. Dankovsky would’ve been lying if he said he didn’t appreciate him trying still. “... Probably.”
“I dislike the way you’re putting it,” Dankovsky grimaced. 

There was a pause. Burakh’s chest rose under Dankovsky’s fixed head; he felt against his worried forehead the ripples of a laugh. 

“... You don’t have to like it,” he said. 

That had been quiet, pliable, velvety. That had been an in-joke. Dankovsky recognized his own words in Burakh’s mouth — and laughed, acrid and sharp; laughed nonetheless. 

“Oynon…”
“Be quiet. Please. Let's be quiet. My head is pounding.”

This was true.
And so they were quiet. 
And so, Burakh pressed his cheek to the top of Dankovsky’s head.
God, Burakh, don't. Don't, you don't know what kind of pyres you're offering yourself as kindling to. Step back. And Burakh didn’t step back. Because Burakh couldn’t read minds. Step back… Dankovsky thought again, weaker this time, and Burakh’s head on his grew heavier, as if to directly go against his order (which he couldn’t hear. He might have, indeed, stepped back, had Dankovsky said it out loud. But he hadn’t said it out loud. So Dankovsky would never know how this scene would have unraveled, had he said it out loud.)
Dankovsky stepped back. 

“Thank you,” he said. He pinched the bridge of his nose — in tiredness, in embarrassment, in shame, maybe, maybe in shame. “Sorry for that.”
“You're welcome.”
“Well,” Dankovsky sighed, composing himself. “Haut-les-coeurs.”
“Hah?”
“That’s an… invitation to bravery of sorts. Hearts up, hearts out, hearts in front… Let us carry on. French.”
“French? Good god,” Burakh tsk-tsk’ed. But he was smiling.  

     Having found the strength to put his awfully-red vest and tie back on, which didn’t even look that red anymore, Dankovsky waved Burakh down as he came back from washing the blood of his hands. 

“... The inquisitor does not like me,” Dankovsky said. “None of them do. We have history, a bitter one. They’ve been on my trail. They’ve been on my tail. They expect me to trip. You have my explicit permission to blame it on me.”
“Blame what?”
“Whatever needs to be blamed. I work under auspices they themselves couldn’t wrestle with. They terrify me, of course they do. But a terror human and grounded, the likes of which my true foes scoff at.”
“Very well.”
“Oh, and, Burakh?” Burakh tilted his head up in listening. Dankovsky pointed at the stockpile of weapons. At the carefully-arranged munitions boxes. “Help yourself.”

     He’d need those. The army came to town. 

.❊.

     Something at the Trammel. Something at the Willows too. Spooling, spoiling, simmering. Suppurant. He ran there. 
The Bachelor noticed the black leather of a holster that lined the shoulder-openings of Lyuricheva’s fern-green vest. He watched her take, then fit a handgun into it, and hide the weapon as she slipped on her long emerald coat. As if composing herself, she adjusted her cravat; that mauve cloud that clung to her pale, tense neck like a fog-bruise. 

“Afraid?” he asked. 
“Not afraid. Cautious.”
“Well, I am.”

Don't batter the doom-drum, just yet. But ready your hand. 

     He went to Georgiy. Georgiy watched him from the depths of eyes brown a deep porphyry. He spoke in a voice like his own, unlike his own. Spoke of astonishing things fulfilled. Then, his nose began to bleed. And one of his eyes turned green; a profoundly Kain green, viper-cipellino, this venous marble still with its hints of red — not Georgiy’s brown anymore, not Viktor’s green; something else, someone else(’s). So Dankovsky knew what that meant, and ran out. 

He'd gone with the twins. Dankovsky needn't be convinced; Peter feared for his Tower, and Andrey feared for Peter. The Bachelor needn't be convinced — the marvel stood tall enough as is. It was dusk, Dankovsky was tired (he always was, nowadays), and the exhaustion, in some way, helped appreciate the wonder. 
Worn to the bone, the way the Tower carried itself so proudly was awe-inspiring. Oh, he was almost jealous. Worn to the marrow, the white sails of her sides looked translucent. Skin before a candle. Paper burned. The edges of her felt to be pointing, pointing straight at him. Peter must have felt it as well; he whined and cowered. Fear bled over his face; exhaustion and drunkenness too. 

Could she, angel, stand in the face of Inquisitors, angels equally, under the aegis and command of other gods entirely? Peter wanted it not to be worshipped — but how could a believer not? A real believer knew to maintain the essence of the object of their worship, and with the Tower it was so much easier, for she was no object at all. Her essence was to imbue soul into her devotees, in the same way her devotees imbued soul into her. Her worship was of reciprocity. 
In French, which Dankovsky had made the mistake to try to learn, Prometheus was Prométhée, and -ée in any other place was female. Declined, made-to-agree, adjectived, perfect-tensed and past-participled, in French, Prométhée, who stole fire from the gods, was a woman. (This was not quite how that worked. Oh, but spare him — spare him, his head pounds.) Here’s where his mind went: so was the Tower.
Daughter, sister, niece then, ballerina, wasp, rose; copper-flaked mobile that the fires below slowly made spin on her stork-leg, folded-tenfold head upon the pin of her body. Womb – lung – spleen. Uterine and intestine lining. Kidney – skin – spleen. Living – squirming – standing thing. Prométhée, who was spared the punishment of the eagle, but was surrounded by birds nonetheless. Beaks and claws, beaks and claws… At the feet of her who stood, the Pest shaped itself into Zeus the bird, for nothing else but to make Dankovsky sleep worse at night. (He could think that, but this problem was self-inflicted: he was the one trying to superimpose the myths he was familiar with over this whole thing, after all; blanketing it with the purple veil of prose and stories as if it would make the shapes of what lay under easier to grasp. This unknowable thing that unraveled between his fingers like Ariadnê’s thread soaked in vinegar. See? Here he is, doing it again.)

The twins scrapped the scene of their heavy steps, coats after them like the mourning shawls of choephoroi. No red nails-streaks pearled with their blood on their white cheeks: the time was not to mourning. (The prophet would have said not yet; the man, maddened with hope, didn’t say anything.)

“OIMOI TALAINA!” said one, somber but not mad. Of his hands he hit his chest. It rang ‘cross the proskênion.
“Ô TALAIN’EGÔ!” responded to his wail the other, not dissimilarly. Miserable him, indeed. Holding onto his miracle with such strong hands that his grip, tightened around his shirt at the neck, was turning white at the knuckles. 

THE BACHELOR
What says you?

THE TWIN DOLOMITIC
It’s Greek. 

THE BACHELOR
I gathered. 

THE TWIN DIORITIC
Electra. 

THE BACHELOR
Which one?

THE TWIN DIORITIC
Sophocles’.

THE BACHELOR
Evidently.

THE TWIN DOLOMITIC
Can’t a man quote tragedies when living through one?

THE BACHELOR
Quote away as much as you’d like. I’m busy. 

THE TWIN DOLOMITIC
How unlike you! You used to love your quotes. You’ve changed. You’ve been changed. 

THE BACHELOR:
Evidently! Evidently. Out of everything, this would have been the strangest thing to leave me unchanged.

THE BACHELOR gestures to the text.

THE BACHELOR
What’s this about?

THE TWIN DOLOMITIC
Go on, what is?

THE BACHELOR
The… format.

THE TWIN DIORITIC
It’s called “the shape”.

THE BACHELOR
The shape, then, what the hell is this about?

THE TWIN DOLOMITIC
It has changed. So has many a thing.

THE TWIN DIORITIC
So much has, when you were not looking — off-stage, where you didn’t dare go.

THE TWIN DOLOMITIC
The world is irreparably changing shape. 

THE BACHELOR
Oh, don’t even start.

THE TWIN DOLOMITIC
Not unlike you!

THE BACHELOR
Enough now. I must go. I know what must be done.

THE TWIN DOLOMITIC
Exit stage right, then. It is bad luck to do otherwise. 

THE BACHELOR
How so? 

THE TWIN DIORITIC
It would be the side where the audience’s story ends. The sentence stops and the page closes. 

THE BACHELOR
Fine. 

Instead, he crossed the proscenium line. He sat by the edge of the stage and pushed himself down; there was no audience, because his needed no seats. He walked out. The twins watched as he did. 
Let there be heard the lekythion, godhate-harbinger, omen of threats and destruction.
Then, exited the twins also. Now Gêryôn hang-and-hold-the-s yourhis head as brute force struck youhim down. There couldn’t be enough of twothree to protect such a herd — herd of one, one big full, one fulfilled, one waiting to fulfill its promise, just give it time, just give her time, shield her. 

     Dankovsky visited the Polyhedron. 
He had business with the Kain son; this petty king, indeed, who had his sister’s dauntingly blue eyes, and who stared like he knew. (Knew what? The Bachelor couldn’t even guess. That made him this much more unnerving.)
The Bachelor thought that, had he done this earlier, he might have found the strength to keep himself from collapsing. Equally, he thought he’d have gone mad. 
Its soft chiming. Its tender creaks, like a pulse. The bulging and flattening of its sides like sails into which blew auspicious winds. Miracle folded-onto-itself. Wearing itself as outwardly skin. Presenting its face as its face, and not as the mask of it. Or maybe, oh, equally wonderfully, so many masks, polyphormic, polychromatic, metamorphotic. Phrenetic, of lungs. It breathed like man does. 

As he walked down the hundreds, maybe the thousands of stairs, he found Burakh at the bottom of them. 

“Do you want my hand to get down?”

The words had been cleanly, softly delivered. Not low as a whisper, but low as an offering. 

“No,” Dankovsky said. He watched as Burakh’s eyes clung to his face, his eyes dew drops on the interweaving of cobwebs that was the Bachelor’s face. 

“Give me your arm instead.”

Ask for so much that they must refuse — this was a favorite of the Bachelor’s, because he had used it so many times. But Burakh steadied himself on his feet, adjusted his balance, and offered his whole arm.
Well.
Dankovsky took it. 
Burakh didn’t walk him home, but Dankovsky undoubtedly considered inviting him.  

.❊.

     This is a scene of dream, so I want nobody on stage. Not even him. Alright, dull the light. I need the sound of pacing. Wash the paint off the thyromata. Tell the war outside, out-scene, on foreign shores, to quiet down. Do not bring its victors, its captives, its noxious smell of hecatombs. Do not bring its interweaving of cursed houses, and cursed houses cursing cursed houses. 
On the autopsy table, two- or maybe one-and-a-half-headed bird. Dead. Dankovsky watches.Two stone statues behind him. 
Marble rolls off the table. He follows it, statues follow him. Marble rolls off the stage. He follows it, statues follow him. Marble rolls down steps one after the other. He follows it, statues follow him. Marble rolls across a room, heavy thick stuffy with everything bitter pungent and sweet, opium hashish and wine. He follows it, statues follow him. Marble rolls off an edge, into a man-shaped hole. Marble rolls into a man — into the empty socket of an eye. Marble eye rolls back put back into place. Pupil. Look glance gaze. Gazed into. Teeth show smile widens. Head rolls back and this way Dankovsky falls too. Back hits bed, awake. He's awake. Town’s folded twice onto itself. House’s haunted — what else?  

.❊.

     His discussion with younger Vlad worried him. Haunted, obsessed, hunted him. As he stepped on soil, he thought he could feel the bubbling of calamity under his steps. Sand felt mellower, as if wet; grass looked pinker than he'd first seen. Foundations of houses looked darker, swollen and gorged. So was it such, then? Pest entered the world of the living through a hole, a hole in the ground, like all illnesses do, like it had entered Dankovsky’s body? The walls were closing in. The scope of belief felt to narrow — Dankovsky thought he at last had a hypothesis, yes, but the borders of meaning and movement also felt to tighten around him, growing and thickening ramparts that barred escape. He’d have to figure it out, quickly — before the gates were shut. The army was coming, no, the army had come. They bellowed by the bulwarks. Eventually, they’d guard the gates, rifles crossed above the road out like the town’s new rulers’ armoiries.

“Burakh, the town smells of blood.”
“Oynon, they sacrifice bulls.”
“Who is they? I know that smell. It isn't bulls.”

Such an observation had not boded well for Cassandra of Troy. This town over the Gorkhon had been besieged by more misery than a godly strike — a sickness you could not pray to, pray for or against; a Fury that no sacrifice appeased, an ancestral divinity that did not worry itself with justices. 
(Oh, how close he was. Myth is mended ‘round truth, molten to its shape like silver.)

     It was around ten in the evening when Dankovsky booked it for the Abattoir. The air was hot with the pyres, which was usual, with bodies and movement, which was not. He was dazed, he was sober. Stride’s steady, thoughts were not. He, who had become so profoundly resentful of this town's rulers who'd send him ‘cross town to their whims and fancies, had felt the unsuppressable urge to run east, through town and steppe, at such an hour, through such a place.
He didn’t want to get the smell of death on his coat. He didn’t want to get the smell of death on his vest. He didn’t want to walk into that dark cave he’d only seen from afar with a gun, for he feared it’d spit him right back out. 
Outside, the army was everywhere. The smell of rifles, rotting wood of their stocks, copper-smell of the metal of their triggers and barrels bleeding on ungloved, sweaty fingers polluted the air. It stank of army male — stench of blood, of trench, lingering mud-dirt, undershirt moth-bitten and dank; anger, despair, evils who cling to the skin and rot it from inside. Balancing this crowd were Brides. They had come into the town more often, the fast few days, but now they were everywhere. They wailed and weeped, they pointed. They hurled and chanted. Howled. Behind their masks, Dankovsky could see the soldiers didn’t quite know what to make of it. After Ms. Ravel’s stunt, he, Burakh and Rubin had needed reassure the Commander of the harmlessness of the women of the town, including Ms. Ravel, we promise she won’t do it again, and if she does you can lock her up again, but we will come to free her, and the army’s boys must’ve gotten orders to not hurt the Brides. Bad luck to come across a witch, worse luck to harm one. And these women might not even have been witches, so harming them would have been even worse an omen still.

     Dankovsky hurried past the Spleen, the Warehouses, fast worried strides into the Works. No light from Burakh’s hideout. 
As the silhouette of the Abattoir grew darker, taller against the night sky, Dankovsky felt a strange sense of calm gain ground upon him. Alea jacta est — he’d made his choice, he’d made the choice to deal with the consequences of it. He slowed to a pace approaching the—the Gates of Sorrow, these were called, were they not? This fantastic black maw. He trod through tall dark grasses. The scent of twyre climbed him, vinelike, poisonously sweet ivy. At the Gates, a heave, a sigh. Emanations smelled of earth rather than meat. He patted his pocket — he’d brought a knife. Felt only fitting.  

.❊.

     They were burning bulls in here, some of the black body-deep organs, those beneath all of the meat — tiny amounts, he would guess at the smell, flesh chunks big as a knuckle. They were setting them ablaze with pieces of horns, it smelled dully of keratin, and herbs. Of course they’d burn herbs. 
The place smelled of sibyl. Stank of honeysweet, what was this, ethylene from under the Pythia’s feet? — reeked of marjoram. Holy myrtle, resinous. Bled in its hollows of earthwitch, whose shadow womanshaped slithered. Smelt deep of earthmusk like the delphic adyton.

He walked over a thin, serpentine stream; in the penumbra and the ruby shimmer of the clay cavewalls, it looked red — and it might have been. Which one was this, this nooselooping amphisbaina that snaked lower down still? Lethe, veil of mindwhiting; woeful Akheron? Maybe ‘twas Styx, the she-Shuddering, river and woman at once — woman mother of, of…
The Bachelor, whose dealt card was Death, witnessed his own once more. 
Shadow of waning watching waning of shadow. 

Styx of the shivers — mother of Nikê, among others, whose auspices Dankovsky had begged. 

As he descended, there was singing.

[Disorganized stasimon, on the stage of strong-footed women.]

     The Bachelor was mediocre of a geologist, and had never felt it more sharply than there, in the dark, as he palmed around in the dark and could not tell what kind of stone he was touching. Here felt like granite, coarse and dense, the edge of a protruding ridge, this thin bladelike end, a threat of the rock. Here felt like schist, its irregular plates granular, friable-feeling. It disintegrated under his uncertain touch. Here, a stone-gash, a long and sharpened opening, blind after the first knuckle; a yawn between two striae, a dry wound. 
No end to it all. No beginning either. Dankovsky knew for a fact he could not turn ‘round. 

There came a light, dulled and expansive as breath, ruddy. The chants carried, carried on. Silhouettes were below, or above, or just next to him somewhere, dancing. 

The ethylene — which he believed only could explain the sweet smell — must've gotten to him, to his head, to his body, for he was dreaming now, he must’ve been. He was in the depths of a great big pit. Its straight walls towered (and the use of the word did not fail to make him nervously snicker) over him. There was a godstone here; to the touch it was cold and slick as if cavewater had thoroughly dripped on it. A warm body was on it. He froze. 
Warm, so not dead, right? Warm, slightly still supple, but unmoving. Lain on the stone and waiting. Blood turning cold and his heartbeat growing maddened, Dankovsky palpated around for a wrist, for the pulse inside of the wrist. From the thickness of it, thicker than his, he induced this was not one of the witchbrides, which only mildly reassured him, because at least he expected them to be there: he had heard — or thought he had heard — them singing. 
Glove-shield kept him from feeling skin. What was that leather, but a shell? He’d have done something drastic to find a heartbeat, and he did: took one of his gloves off.
No pulse. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. No pulse on the wrist so let’s look elsewhere; still patting around blindly, Dankovsky found the shoulder, shot for the neck and landed in hair — his breathing hitched and stopped. It felt familiar — not because he had touched it before, but because he could so clearly picture it from what his touch relayed to him. Let it not be… His hands found the hollow of jaw, stubbly, where he could not perceive a pulse still. The shape of the chin and throat, revealed by touch, overwhelmed him with terror at their familiarity. 

“Wouldn’t have thought you the wandering-hands kind, erdem,” spoke the corpse from the darkness. “That’s more of my thing.”

Dankovsky’s stomach rose to his throat as he felt it tighten, then dropped; through his guts, onto the clay floor, which for all he knew could be covered with more organs than his own. 
Well, Burakh’s corpse, warm corpse, supple corpse, spoke. In the same way Dankovsky had witnessed his own death and come back, now it was Burakh’s turn to linger one foot in Charon’s pirogue, one foot on the shore. But as far as Dankovsky could feel it, he was on the cold clay godstone.

“What are you doing here?” Dankovsky weakly asked, voice pale and thin with bewilderment. He was dreaming, he knew he was — no, he didn’t know. He hoped. It was what made the most sense. But he didn’t know. 
“What are you?” Burakh didn’t-reply, his voice steadier.
“I’m looking for something.”
“And I am too.”

So what, was Burakh looking for the source of this pestilence too? That subterranean scourge that grew from the ground, this rabid, reflective rot? Well, he could have told him, couldn’t he have? They could have gone in together, or relied on the other! No need for both to go — but this didn’t explain how Burakh got himself killed. No, not killed — dead. Got himself dead like Dankosky once got himself sick. 
This didn’t make sense. It wasn't going to make sense — senselessness prevailed. No, not senselessness — foreignness. This underground world acted on its own principles, Dankovsky had to admit to himself — earth-principles, witch-laws, rot-rules. 
His eyes could not adjust to the dark, and he began patting around again, by Burakh’s side, feeling the cold stone. Then, against his ungloved fingers, something colder still.

“What is that, that I touched?”
“It’s a knife, oynon.”
“And what am I supposed to do with the knife, pray tell?”
“You know what you are supposed to do with the knife.”

Evidence imposed itself to the Bachelor’s mind like a bullet. This felt familiar, sickeningly so, narratively so, his midsagittal line itched, just right of where his heart should be. 
He grabbed the knife. He palpated around to find the notch of the collarbones. He patted down, feeling for cloth that he’d have to get rid of. He found none, just skin. Warm skin for a corpse.
When, around what would have been the hip, he touched cloth, Dankovsky sighed in relief. Burakh’s corpse cackled at that. It cackled, then fell silent quickly. Dankovsky heard the sound of worried deglutition — it wasn’t his own, it didn’t sound like it. 

“I’ve never… done this before,” Burakh squirmed, as much as corpse could squirm, as his usual composure slipped off him like the white sheet over his body. 
“Laid there? I would hope so,” Dankovsky ironized through gritted teeth. 
“You know what I mean,” Burakh grumbled. Then, some kind of frivolity came over his features and he smirked, chuckled to himself, seemed to need to prepare himself to make whatever joke he was about to. “I don’t just get naked for anyone, you know.”

Burakh-corpse on the Burakh-cairn surely had wanted that last sentence banterful, somewhat teasing, raking his voice falsely-sensually on the syllable — he thought it was just that, but Dankosvky didn’t crack a smile. 
(Burakh shivered at the cold he didn’t feel, and the embarrassment of being naked under that shroud and the eyes of a man who didn’t even laugh — which, that, he felt. Dankovsky couldn’t know this: all he saw, as finally, finally the room lightened, barely enough to draw the shape of Burakh’s silhouette, was that Burakh’s gaze, two pin-pricks of wet over his eyes, pinned itself to the cave-ceiling and refused to come down for a while.)

“... Will it hurt?” Burakh eventually asked. 
“It shouldn’t, if done properly.”

Dankovsky knew of the feeling — inside of this scene, inside of his story, nestled another one, nestled him, lain on the godstone, taking so much space, all taut-stretched, in the small opening. He thought that in another story, another layer of the story, another dream, he was the one under that knife, and under Burakh’s eyes. (And it didn’t hurt.)

“Tilt your head back. It’ll be easier for me.”

Burakh felt the intrusion of the scalpel, which Dankovsky knew he did, because he felt it too — he (they, halves of a same listening head) heard the wet sound of the cut, felt the force of the pressure, but no pain. The cut dribbled red dots which gathered in strands that began to sprawl, hyphae/roots/veins/rivers, on each bank of the thin blood-brook. They snaked down the flanks, over the nipples, between the ripples of the ribs, of the muscle. Skin still was supple, Dankovsky could steady it under scalpel. Pulling but mostly pushing, in, slowly, carefully. 

Why was he doing that? What was even the point of doing that? There had been a knife, then Burakh had spoken, and Dankovsky had obeyed. What was the point? What was he even looking for, cutting, when he had gone in looking for rot, and didn’t believe he’d find it in Burakh? Senselessness reigned. No, no — subterranean law did. Chthonian rites respond to chthonian gods, and even not believing in any, Dankovsky followed the trials. He cut because he was meant to cut. He cut because he was returning in kind.

[Disorganized stasimon, on the stage of strong-footed women.]

So spoke the wound he had made: 

“I am a mouth, aren’t I?”
“Oh, don’t start,” he snapped in response. “Don’t start.”
“Don’t you want a kiss?” the wound quipped. 
“What did I just say?”
“You can only dream,” it huffed. “You said it yourself: you are unloveable.”
“I’ve never said anything of the sort.”

(But it sounded familiar, didn’t it? Similia similibus cōgitantur — like is thought by like… but left unsaid.)

“Oh, right… You believe in the unreciprocity of things. You believe in dualities.”
“This is not what this is about.” (Wasn’t he reciprocating? Maybe he was the only one who knew about the story nestled within the story.) “Didn’t I tell you to not start?”
“Matters not now, for I have.”
“Then stop.”

He cut because he was allowed, in this adyton, he was, whereas at the surface he’d have been killed. He cut because he liked it.

[Disorganized stasimon, on the stage of strong-footed women. The procession folds fivefold upon itself. It beats, it heart-spleen, heart-seeping, hound-keen.]

Roped in the bosom, bulwarks of earth
where they slaughter the earthbulls,
Head spins, meaningdearth,
Senselessness lulls.

From ground mythical phlogiston
Curls up in snakes:
butchers of Laokôon
crushing sickness aches —

Bull’s hacked
bull hack— dark cack–
–ling, with a joy like that of 
spring, for it owns and puppets
illness rewritten palimpsests.

To Mother, bloodflow
trickles; to beasts, deathblow
fickle, for one dies, here as above,

and is reborn, 
the sweet twyredrink,
drunk in the rhytonhorn, 
stains like ink. 

Depths of Mo–
–ther terror of maw
seer cut through skin–
–veil of smoke, g(l)utted thin.

Chapter Text

     He could have taken just a step, he could have taken a thousand — suddenly, everything was black. Black, black, he didn't have the word to describe a black this black, neither do I, and I am here with him. A black not even tinted the red of one's own eyelids when they close, devoid of the purplish grey of a particularly dark night, of the hazy ashy shapes of things around. Black as black as black could ever be, nothing else, everything of itself at once. The black of the bowels of the earth, where not even a whisper of light can make its way through the rock. 
Oh, Dankovsky thought, I'm going to die in here.
He could feel warmth against his neck, in the small of his back; perhaps the smokes rising from crevasses at the Pythia's feet, maybe the breath of the lions he had been thrown to. He heard the scampering of feet, not his own he was sure; maybe working Worms, Butchers laboring at the skinning of bulls; maybe the Brides. The earth felt to close around him. A wound closing around a splinter, burying it below the epidermis, swelling and putrefying around it, around him. Dankovsky was understanding — understanding that he had stepped into something he couldn't understand. He became more sure the warmth was from divinatory fumes — his head began to spin, his mouth to dry. He wished Ariadnê would get him the fuck out of here. The warmth on his back was from his wings burning. He hoped for Ariadnê — he became convinced he would meet the Minotaur. Or rather, the Minotaur would meet him; would walk to him, would find him there, standing straight, tall, frozen, burning. Alone in the dark, a hand outstretched to feel the walls-intestinelinings that had shaped themselves aroundagainst him and away from his touch. Whoever finds him; Minotaur, Worm, Butcher, w/Witch, G/god displeased with his hubris, he hoped they would make it quick. He knew he was going to die there. He couldn’t say he didn't have it coming. He couldn’t say he didn't…

A hand on his shoulder. Right where his burning wings should have scorched the skin off, but didn't. It got heavier instead, it moved to the caved apse between his shoulder blades. Dankovsky’s body had frozen, he underneath the film of his flesh felt like he had jumped out of himself in fear, bones and guts and lungs and all.

"Who—"
"Oynon."

Ariadnê Minotaur Icarus Theseus-bullkiller Daedalus the architect the son-burier all waned into the darkness they had extricated themselves from; the familiar myths fell back into the black like vanishes away a very soft snow. Only was left, familiar in different, newer ways, Burakh. Burakh and his flat wide hand somewhere on Dankovsky’s shoulder, or back, or neck; anywhere it would land as he patted and probed around, seemingly blind himself as well.

“You don’t have to be okay with what I’ve done,” Burakh began in the surrounding, stuffy darkness, “you don’t have to look, you don’t even have to open your eyes, and I will… hold you by the hand if you need me to, but what I need more for you is to leave, to leave with me, to start fucking walking out of here now.”

Dankovsky had no idea that he had closed his eyes — no, actually, he had no idea if his eyes were even closed, and he figured Burakh had no way of knowing regardless of what he had said. And what was there to be okay, or not okay with? He could have said the same — he might have ought to. The faint smell of blood, earthy, meaty, this fragrant blade-rust swirled past Dankovsky’s nostrils as he heard the shuffling of Burakh’s boots across the dry rock ground. 
Burakh grabbed his arm just below the meaty part of the shoulder — Dankovsky winced and hissed a sharp warning of pain and Burakh’s hand moved to his elbow instead. He tugged slowly, somewhat gently, coaxing Dankovsky into walking like one would a frightened animal. Dankovsky scoffed to himself, but began to follow. 

“Be careful to not drag your feet,” Burakh warned him, and his voice had no echo. It was as if the earth had packed itself dense and close around them like burial dirt. Like Burakh was just by his ear, closer to his neck — which he might have been, for all knew; he couldn’t see. “The stone’s uneven.”

He pulled some more, and the Bachelor was after him. 
He slowly began to make out shapes, red and claypink and soft fleshy ochre seeping through the veil of penumbra like rain through cotton; as if the absolute, impenetrable darkness he had been surrounded with had been nothing but the flash of black that shadowed the snuffing of all lights, the heart-beating second before one's eyes adjust to the dark. As if this second, this pitch-black, meat-thick instant had been stretched for what felt for hours by the hands of the prehensible, tentative, taunting earth around them.
They made it to a widened chancel, walls of red rock lined with spare torches and lanterns, just bright enough for Dankovsky to take a good look at Burakh. Well — it was Burakh; him and not Theseus, nor the Minotaur, for that matter. He’d forgone his tunic for a reason foreign to Dankovsky, and rolled the sleeves of his blue knit to the elbows. He had fresh cuts on his hands, their needle-thin edges pearled with red dots. Looking down on himself now that his eyes could find his body, Dankovsky noticed his white shirt had been stained red where Burakh had touched him — this, for some reason, made him sigh in relief. Better stained another man’s blood than dead. At any other time, in any other place, he wasn’t sure he’d have thought the same, but he thought this now, and he wasn’t sure anything else quite mattered down here. 

How long had Burakh hesitated, his hand nervous, his arm too, a thready pulse in its sinews? Eventually:

"Go in front,” Dankovsky said, “I'll follow."

Clouds roamed past and over Burakhs face, leaving in their wave ripples of worry between his brows, on his forehead.

"I'm not doing that. I know how the story goes."

What could that well mean…? Dankovsky’s ears rang with the thought that he knew, but it didn’t quite crawl to the front of his mind. The story burrowed in its pages, under the ashes of books that had mattered more to him. 
Burakh extended his hand.
Dankovsky hesitated, nervously braced on his heels, gracelessly stumbled — or so it felt, somewhat apprehensively extending his own back. Burakh watched him hesitate, but Dankovsky was not sure he had read it as hesitation, and grabbed his arm at the wrist, between the black of the glove and the white of the rolled sleeve. He didn't tug and didn't squeeze. He moved on his heels until his back was to Dankovsky, he adjusted his hold and pressed it against his side like he was expecting Dankovsky to wring himself away. Then he began walking, and Dankovsky followed.  

"Slow down,” he grumbled. “My legs are shorter than yours."

Burakh did, exaggeratedly so, and Dankovsky huffed just as much.

Dankovsky knew that Burakh knew how the story ended. He stuck to the script regardless, not looking back. He slowed down when their arms became distended between the two of them to let Dankovsky catch up, adjusted his grip on the Bachelor’s wrist to hold his hand against his flank again, and walked on once more. When scaling the rock, he was careful to walk a path and pace Dankovsky could follow, which proved easier for him; where Burakh had to trek through like an ox, he was closer to an ibex. It was maybe the first time he didn't regret his shoes being narrow and slim, agile enough to find the sparse stable steps within the eroded stone. 

     It darkened. Burakh went, he followed, iambic; this long, sprawling self of his after the Haruspex, faster on his feet. Still everywhere this smell sibyllic, the womanwitch’s, of claybone and bloodcuts, burned oxhide, wicked twyre. It was growing stronger — just in front — Burakh stilled first. 

“Who dance you for, earth-wed earth-woman?” he asked in the waned light — notably, as Dankovsky realized who he could be talking to, in the language the Bachelor could understand. 
“For my mother, my mother who is earth, my mother who is red hoof my mother is black bone white horn, my mother who is moon,” his interlocutor replied. A Herb Bride, unmistakable with the earthy rasp of her voice, with the hoarseness and breathlessness of effort. 
“Let us through, basaghan,” Burakh spoke, soft and low, the hint of pleading in his words only due to exhaustion. 
“I am not blocking your way. I cannot keep you here.”

She meant her words: Dankovsky felt her, more than he saw her, move; he heard the battering of her bare feet against the naked smooth stone, the way the soil shivered under her step. The chiming of her jewelry — Dankovsky could picture, wrapped around her wrists and ankles, the leather straps pearled of sanded bones like precious beads — betrayed her path as she walked away: she was burrowing deeper into the darkness whence they had come. 

Against Burakh’s flank, Dankovsky felt the back of his held hand grow hot, grow damp, from what it was pressed against — either sweat or blood, neither of which he was enthused, nor displeased by. He was drained — not the drained of hard labor, the exhaustion of a work well, but painfully done. He was drained like bled dry, like limb stolen of blood, like poison sucked and spat out. The dense loose wool in his head had been spun on a spool, wrung out of him; it trailed a maze he could not even see the walls of. Hail Ariadnê all he might, there was no exit she could find. He was no Theseus. (Was Bachelor Dankovsky still the same Bachelor Dankovsky after having all of his original components replaced, oh yes replaced, without ever having been removed, melted like silver, then cast as a ring, as gear, as an arrow, cast as a smaller, but just-as-dense version of himself, every silvercell of his body of meat-and-not-much-else changed in essence by the going-below, going-under, katabasis?) 
He followed Burakh; he followed by walking fast enough to slightly push him on. They almost walked side by side; Dankovsky’s arm bent and his elbow pressed into Burakh’s ribs. 

     Eventually, they could see light — well, darkness again, but a darkness alive with the silver of moon and stars, with the copper of fires, with the hazy, ashy shapes of grass, rock and dancers against the skies. A darkness breathed-into. The peppery smell of twyre whipped Dankovsky across the face as they walked out of the stone maw and he almost stumbled backwards, kept on his feet only because Burakh hadn't let go of his arm yet. 
In the wake of the twyre came the scent of death, of skin, of bodies whole being thrown to the fire. On the pyres, the corpses breathed smoke, dancing flame-blades; the wind agitated the rising clouds like incense out of thuribles. The dead were burned with their clothes on, for it was too risky to take their belongings from the piles in which they were left to rot; as such, the smell of burning leather rose into the air, animal, fleshy, meaty again, familiar to Dankovsky. The immolation of a bull, broken over the altar of the town, distributed among the believers. (And, equally, the non-believers: Dankovsky stood and watched as the pyres swayed in the wind, as the shadows of the Herb Brides cut black holes against the gold of flames. He witnessed.) 

Burakh mellowed the fingers of his grasp like one gives slack on reins. Slowly, gently — let this be said — as if he feared letting go too hard and fast would have Dankovsky’s arm snap off his body with its weight. Dankovsky watched as he walked in front some more, looking as if leading the way back into the world of the living. He slowly turned on his heels to face Dankovsky, who could see he indeed bled. He’d been able to spot the cuts on his hands, the watercolor-like lingering of blood up to his wrists, but red seeped through the blue of his knit, rising to the surface dark as wine, as night. 

“Where is your coat?” Burakh asked. His voice rang over the hissing of the pyres, the wind of the dark, the chants of the Brides, chimed like one of those grave-bells. “Where’s your vest?”
Barely emerging from his haze, Dankovsky replied: “Stillwater. I left the place without it.”
“Without your coat? And unarmed, too?” Burakh, bewildered, kept on questioning.
“I’m armed,” Dankovsky retorted.

At that, he pulled a knife from this pocket. A sharp clean click. 

“Switchblade?” Burakh mused, almost amused. “This looks like something you’d have picked up at the Warehouses.”
“It is. I got it from Notkin.”
“So he likes you know?”
Dankovsky shrugged. “He doesn’t hate me. I don’t think so, at least.”

Burakh’s eyes thinned as he thought, eyeing the Bachelor up and down.

“I guess it is from you he’d have picked that up, huh.”
“Picked what?”
“Something he said the other day. Uh. Quod erat demonstrandamn.”
“Demonstrand-um. And, well, that does seem something he would have heard from me.”

Oh how pity was it to the Bachelor to know he was in any way influential. At any other time, in any other place, pride would have bloomed in his chest like this sweetest of diseases. Now, shame crept over him, thousands-legged, heavy and cold, dense as charcoal. He was going to disappoint these kids, the sweet kids who called him uncle, and those who didn’t just as well; Notkin, king-thief who stole up to his words, endearingly; Khan, who waited on him to protect—no, help protect his kingdom, selfishly perhaps; poor little hare Grace who he promised to give her hooks—the dead’s hooks—back to; imperial Capella who, having guided then lost then guided him again, was an ally to him as much as he was to her; Sticky, thief among the thieves who, skinny as his namesake, had slithered places to be the Bachelor’s eyes where the Bachelor’s eyes couldn’t reach; god who else, Murky, little Murky, who didn’t seem to like him very much but he wasn’t sure she liked anyone; he knew Burakh was watching over them too but even that didn’t feel enough, not because Burakh was incapable, and not because he was either, but because something bigger loomed and gloomed and breathed heavy dark gloom over their faces —

“You’re bleeding.”
“Huh?”
“Your arms, Burakh. Your side too.”

Black as night, blood seeped through. 

“Oh. That, yeah.”
Dankovsky sharpened his gaze. “You’re cut.”
“Yes.”

Oh, say something else! 
The air was suddenly salient and thin-as-blade, cold as silver, pointed like a bloodhound’s ears; Dankovsky realized something was way off. He strode to Burakh’s side and lifted his arm. He took hold of his wrist — his turn. 

“You have cuts on your hands.”
“I do.”
“Superficial. What happened?”
“Dumb stuff.” (That came out too quickly out of Burakh’s mouth. Quickly like a lie that slips, a lie used to slither out.) “Palms too sweaty to keep hold of the handle of my knife… shoving my hands in my pockets forgetting I have sharp objects in there… I don’t have my whole head anymore,” Burakh finished with a bitter twitch of the lip in something like a smile.
“I could have told you that for nothing from you,” Dankovsky teased with equally nervous of a smirk.
“Oh, piss off,” Burakh barked, but neither the lightness in his voice nor the quirk of his mouth escaped the Bachelor’s eyes. 

What came over Dankovsky next was more animal than man; more matter than mind. His mind had gone — if not gone, it had wandered where he could not reach it and wrangle it back into his skull. His hand still held Burakh’s as he observed; he made no motion to move it, but dipped his head to the knuckles, animal indeed animal at the trough, and licked the thin stripes of wound on his fingers. One by one. 
He felt the raggedness of the edges of the wound, ever-so-slightly spinescent, thistle or bristle or sand across the smaller papillae of the tip of his tongue. As far as blood went, it tasted like blood — not some coppery myth sweetened or salted by metamorphosis or chimerism. Burakh’s blood tasted like man’s, because he was man, and Dankovsky found it completely alike his own. 
As the Bachelor closed his lips around a drop, he was jerked back to his senses when he felt Burakh’s palm close in a cup under his chin. He shot up straight. 

“Sorry. I don’t know what came over me.”

He didn’t stutter in shame. He did not even feel himself blush. Burakh watched him wrangle composure back into his body in the same way he’d watched him lose it.
 
“You’ve lost your mind, oynon,” Burakh said — said with a small smile, tugging at the corner of his lips (or mouth, of wound, mouth-calling regardless). 
“Oh, I’ve lost much more, Burakh.”

They stood there a second, Burakh watching as his cuts had been wiped clean (but not dry. Shame didn’t even creep upon the Bachelor’s face as he watched how his own spit glistened over Artemy’s hand, shiny dots of mica, copper-flakes, drops of gold, recalls of the lit beacons of grief, of victory in another story). 
His eyes swerved down to Burakh’s flanks, black of blood calling to black of eyes. 

“Your sweater is intact,” Dankovsky stated. “Did you put it back over your wound? Did you not notice?”
“Something else entirely.”

Oh, say something else entir— no, not like that! 
Blood that had laid dormant right out of their exit woke up, slickened basilisk, and began bubbling out of its containants, slithering down Burakh’s flanks. Blackblood glutted out, seemingly ebbing out of the gut. Burakh’s shoulders and arms grew wet-dark, his sides filled with damp shadow; the wool grew soak-gorged. Burakh’s smile faltered off his face and fear ebbed in its stead. 

“That’s—” he muttered out.
“Come with me. Come — Burakh, you need stitches.” Dankovksy’s voice rang out as pale as his face had become. 

He held out a hand, reaching for forearm, elbow, somewhere clean of blood, these parts were all wet-ash-stained with it; Burakh clasped his hand around his wrist, again, finding unsteady hand with unsteady hold. This time, Dankovsky was the one tugging, pressingly pulling Burakh into his trail. 

He walked so close, Dankovsky thought he could hear him sigh over the hairs of his nape. So, he let his hand go. 

Turning on his heels to check on Burakh who dragged behind, he found him staring at his hand, fingers sprawled; the fingers Dankovsky, in a fit of vampiric atavism, had scraped of his tongue. Burakh stared as the thin lips of the cuts pearled tiny red beads that then serpented down to the knuckle, the wrist. He was gesturing vaguely trying to figure out what to do to stop the bleeding. Eventually, he hitched his head up, catching Dankovsky staring at him (staring at the cuts). Man looked worried, moss-blue eyes squinting in contemplation. He stared at Dankovsky back. He stared back and, as another red drop swirled down his tendons, he caught it with his lips. He caught it and licked the red stripe back up to the cut. He licked the stripe to the cut and licked the other cut, and the other cut, and the other cut, and the other cut, … And Dankovsky watched him do it. And Burakh watched Dankovsky watch him do it. And Dankovsky felt his jaw grow slack, and more slack, so slack he thought it’d unhinge from his skull and fall to the ground. He felt spit pool at the back of his tongue, felt it warm all of his mouth enough for two.  

.❊.

     At the threshold of the Stillwater, entering it felt like bursting out of a lung. The warm and damp air outside, pungent with the smell of boot-leather and greased rifle-parts, tuberculositic in its emanations of wet sickgreen phlegm, battered against the door Dankovsy closed after them both. Inside, the atmosphere was cold and dry, slightly dusty, moth-eaten. Behind him, Burakh bent. He heaved. He keeled and kneeled, he shivered. 

“Up,” Dankovsky incited, begged him — “up, up, come on, at least so you can go lie down.”

Burakh managed it barely. He curled up on the bed, over the quilt, which was already red, and already blood-stained, so a bit more didn’t matter, a lot more didn’t matter. Dankovsky hurried to the other side of the room to pick from the bathroom sink the basin he’d left to soak. Filled it. Worrycup, it overflowed. He wiped the sides dry with a sponge and, throwing it inside where it splashed and splattered him, ran to the bedside. 
On it, Burakh was bent, one leg folded on the bed, the other extended away, heel dug into the floorboards, as if to give him balance. Chest pushed against folded leg, as if Burakh hoped the pressure would keep his breathing in check. It did, barely; he heaved. Worry bayed at the Bachelor’s heels, this god-damned dog. He saw how the Haruspex’s arms, stretched before him on the blanket, bore blood-black stains like growing mold. Setting the basin on the nightstand, he approached carefully, feverishly, as if creeping up to a wounded animal. He caught between index and thumb the neck-knit of the damp sweater, and Burakh made no move to bat him away. 

“I am going to need you to take this off,” he stated, the question underlying evident, “so I can assess the wounds.”
“Help me out,” Burakh grunted, and as he pushed himself on his palms and his arms wobbled, his whole body was brutally seized by shivers.

Dankovsky admired the bluntness of the man. Admired so much it struck him across the abdomen and he couldn’t move, as if bleeding from the gash. Burakh grunting again as he fought with the hem of his jumper tore him out of his frozen state, and he leaned in, and tried to find the piece of wool Burakh expected him to hold onto. The thick knit didn’t peel off easy — it clung to skin, molded to it by sweat and blood. Still, under it eventually Dankovsky found the wounds that snaked up Burakh’s arms. 
He had said “you don’t have to be okay with what I’ve done”, had he not? What in god’s name could he have done to get those in return? He knew those shapes; those were no mere wounds. He could so clearly remember them painted on the Brides’ forearms and hands, drawn with chalk on the leather overskirts they sometimes wore, carved on small smooth stones they wore as necklaces, leather cord so loose the pebble whipped around as they madly ran. How long must Burakh have stood there and taken the cutting for these to look like this? Who in the world of the living, or the underground one, could have done this? Down there below, Dankovsky had only heard Brides — and he thought they were not allowed to cut. 
The flanks still covered oozed quietly; Burakh mindlessly patted at his sides. 

“And this too,” Dankovsky ordered, like he had any power to, and Burakh again grunted for his help. 

Maddening it was, how the cotton bore no slit. Had Burakh undressed down there, in front of his butcher? Were those self-inflicted? Dankovsky’s blood turned colder than when he found Burakh’s corpse on the altar. 

“You didn’t do this yourself, did you?”
“I didn’t.”
“Who, then?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“I do, that’s why I asked.”
“I don’t want you to know.”

So ‘twas this. Oh, how it stung.

“Keeping things from me, Burakh?” Dankovsky asked — he tried to twist his mouth in a smile, to sound light-hearted and playful; all he did was show teeth. 
“Yes, erdem.” Burakh pinned his eyes on him, tried to pin his eyes on him, reddened with pain, wet with it too. “In the same way you are from me.”

Dankovsky stilled, again. What was he supposed to say? What could he reveal that didn’t make him sound nuts? 
So ‘twas this — what could Burakh? Alright, he thought, I get it.
Same goes through same as same. 

     Dankovsky had managed to clean the blood enough to see. Under the red cloak of venous ichor, the cuts were just deep enough to necessitate sutures, and then again, luck on their side, not all of them.
Focusing on the needle; on the skin around it as little as he could. Skin parted under the prick with a wet noise, pinhole of needle to slide the stitching one through. Weaved in, inside, then out, outside. Pick a pattern, it matters little. Burakh breathed loud and long through the mouth, puffing cheeks reddened with fastidious flush and flecks of blood. He alternated breathing with his chest and breathing with his stomach (which Dankovsky noticed, because he was staring). As the cuts were shut, slowly, he lowered himself onto the bed, face first. How familiar this felt. 

“You read the Lines, don’t you, Burakh?”
“I ought to. I am fated to.”
“... Do you read between them, too?”

This is where story and memory, imbricated like organs in body, lay and lingered, whispered. The Bachelor could not shake their persistent voices away. 

As Dankovsky closed the last stitch, Burakh kicked his floor-tensed leg behind him, adjusted the folded one, and lay down flat. He let one of his arms dangle pathetically off the mattress, the other bent above his head. 
Dankovsky found it very tempting to do something stupid. 
He dampened the sponge he’d washed the blood off with, and patted it wet to Burakh’s nape, to Burakh’s neck, to the topmost of his back, spattered with freckles. Burakh tensed feeling the cold, then mellowed again. Mellowed until even the hand of his edge-hanging arm opened wider, and a sigh melted into the quilt. 
Daniil dampened Burakh’s shoulder blades, down to the hollow of his back, over his kidneys, where sweat had pooled in a salty film.  Patted the sponge in, then brushed it in circular motions. Burakh grunted; the knot of his eyebrows came loose. He looked to be falling asleep. 
Fieri sentio et excrucior — what was it Dankovsky felt happening, what was it that hurt? He couldn’t tell you, he couldn’t tell himself. Fieri — what a word for happening: fiery as it felt, incandescent, burning Dankovsky’s face right up at the loose nooserope of his shirt’s collar. 

     Dankovsky brought the basin back, and poured it, this worrycup, in the sink. Pink stained the colorful porcelain; nothing a good scrub couldn’t fix, but Dankovsky didn’t have a good scrub left to him. He washed his hands. He realized then, and only then, that one of them was ungloved. 
He washed his face, his hands again. No itch, miraculously. He drank. He slicked his hair back and saw how deep it made the worrywrinkles of his forehead look. 
He walked back to the bedroom and his head still rang with the memory of Burakh on the godstone, and inside this memory of Burakh on the godstone, nestled inside, curled, shape of a silver coin or a bullet hole, a story of him on it. 

     Burakh hadn’t moved from the bed, or his position in the bed. Lying flat, vaguely dead-looking. 

“How are you holding up,” Dankovsky asked. 
“I feel like a corpse thrown in front of an oncoming train.”
“That's… grotesque and very vivid of an image, Burakh.”
“But it’s true.” Barely moving, simply inching his head away, he tried to look the Bachelor in the eyes. “I’ve lied to you enough, haven’t I?”
“You could have lied about this part. I’d have let you.”

Burakh smiled but didn’t laugh — that probably would have tugged at his stitches. 

     Sitting at the desk, the Bachelor tidied his bag. Most medication was gone, given or bartered. Bandages had had to be reused; he folded and put away the pieces he had recently boiled for disinfection and washed. Thread was almost gone — let there be no more gaping wounds, for the love of everything holy and impious at once. He put aside the needle he’d just used, for it needed cleaning again. 

“Did y’like the tea I brought last time?” rose from the bed behind.
“Hm?”
“The tea. How was it?”

Dankovsky was not sure what the situation was, why Burakh was suddenly curious about this, out of everything. Hadn’t he been sleeping? What had woken him, surely not the sound of sorting needles. Dankovsky thought he’d heard him twist on the mattress. Ah…

“It was really good. I don’t even remember if I thanked you.”
“You did.”
“I’m doing it again.”
“Lara’s a connoisseur. Way fancier of a palate than Rubin, Grief or me.” He paused. “Nah, that’s a bit of a lie. I have a pretty fancy palate. I just don’t take the time to make fancy tea.”

Dankovsky laughed. 

“You have a favorite, oynon? One you’re excited to go back to?”

“Go back to”, right… Right, this was a thing. This had been a thing, once. There was something beyond the ramparts of this town, this self-contained world of the deadliving, itself perched atop the living-dead. 

“Mmmh,” he hummed in thought, “strawberry tea, yes… You can put strawberry slices at the bottom of your teapot, inside your tea ball, or you can crush them into a thin paste to let dissolve in the hot tea, stirring slowly…”
“That sounds good…”
“It is. I recommend doing it with black tea.”
“Do you put honey and milk in it?”
“Mmmh. I rarely put milk with strawberry tea, I almost always do honey. You cannot go wrong with honey.”
“I'd kill for strawberry tea, oynon,” Burkakh wistfully sighed.
“Me too. God, me too…”

“How are you feeling?” Dankovsky asked again, after a while.
“… Still like I was thrown in front of an oncoming train, but at least I was alive then.”
“… Burakh… This is possibly worse. It is worse, isn't it?”

Burakh groaned loud and long — Dankovsky thought this was supposed to be a laugh.

“I have this of yours,” Burakh eventually spoke into the quilt, muffled. Dankovsky turned to him, and saw him slowly wave a glove in the air. His stomach sank. 
“Where did you get this?” 
“Don’t remember exactly. You dropped it in the Abattoir when we were exiting.”

He waved it again, and the Bachelor almost snatched it out of his hand. 
It didn’t smell like corpse, it didn’t smell like death. Not even sybillic or witch-bitter; it smelled of leather, with a vague hind of copper — blood, which he was used to. He put it back on hastily. 
Burakh rummaged through his pockets again. He pulled out a blade, unsheathed and unprotected, which he by some miracle didn’t cut himself on, a walnut, two of those holed silver obols; a hazelnut shell, crumbs of soap, a red marble. Something Dankovsky almost didn’t recognize because of how crumbled it was before Burakh fluffed it up — his weird cigarette. Yeah, Dankovsky almost smiled, Burakh deserved a smoke. 
Burakh fiddled with it, twisting it between index and thumb. He straightened his arm out, then, holding the cigarette up to the Bachelor's face. 

“… Don’t you want it?” Dankovsky asked, staring perplexed at the stuffed rolling paper.
“It’s potent enough for two,” Burakh replied — and in his state, groggy already, he might have been saving himself quite the trouble. “Go first. I’ve had my fair share when I was younger.”

Dankovsky imagined a fifteen-year-old Burakh sneaking off to smoke and bursting out in coughs, which made him smile. Then, he thought of the samely-aged children they had spent the past few, the past many days watching over doing the same, and frowned. He took the roll and brought it to his lips. Burakh stared, bleary-eyed over his shoulder, as he patted his pockets fruitlessly. Couldn’t find his matches, couldn’t find his lighter either. He walked across the room to the candles, leaned to their pearlescent flames, and lit the cigarette at the spark of them. 
As he inhaled, the unusual scent crept in immediately. The grassy taste of tobacco was at the front, woody and myrrhic; but instead of a dissolution into the usual acrid aftertaste like a dull wine’s fruity notes cede to bitterness over the back of the tongue, here, the herbs seeped through. One was minty, yes, he thought he could recognize this one, could almost picture it; the taste rolled on itself to his palate, fazed through the tender flesh of it, climbed at the back of his nose, then of his throat. One was dully sweet like sweated wild sage, almost sweet. It crawled deeper into his throat, and climbed up after his tongue. 
The smoke swirled, swerved; spiraled, smoked itself spiral-arm. Reached inward inside itself, smoke-arm spiral-arm bent, elbow wrists and fingers. Fingers, all of them curled, curled in curled itself inside, reached, fingers in the hollow of the mitre-shell, over its ridges, its ribs; over and through Dankovsky’s ribs, weaving through his lungs weaving through the fascia too. 
Fascia calls upon fate, fate calls upon red, red calls upon dream. Dream of red. Dankovsky thought he was about to retch.

“Shit,” he grumbled.
“If it makes you feel that way, you should stop,” Burakh plainly said from where he lay, flattened on the bed. 
“It’s fine. It’s just that the leather of my gloves stinks of smoke now.”

He peeled his gloves off, and didn’t think anything of it. 

He felt like the smoke had done his head in. His mind was filled with it, dense and fragrant, the startling sweetness of some dried flower swimming behind his eyes. He needed great focus to pinch the cigarette between two fingers, and he offered it to Burakh. Who took it — tugged on one of his legs to sit crossed-legged on the bed, and straightened his spine. Dankovsky got a better look at the work he’d just done — what clean stitches for a man who had gotten his hands sullied by scratching the belly of earth from the underside of the sunken underground-serpentine sea. The skin around the wounds was still haloed with the remnants of washed pink and, despite Dankovsky’s best efforts, the wounds themselves were still a bit wet, pearled of red-hued dew. As Burakh inhaled and exhaled, Dankovsky noticed he was careful not to pull on his obliques too much. 
Sent across the room with a soft wind, from a draft somewhere, in its white smoke-sails, the scent as it burned washed upon the white shores of Dankovsky’s face. 

“It smells so different from here, not being the one smoking. The scent of tobacco is almost nonexistent, it is sweeter, it reminds me of—galbanum? Galbanum maybe, chypre fragrances…”
“I suppose that’s the difference between inhaling the fumes of incense and chewing on the stick.”
“Have you ever chewed on an incense stick, Burakh?”

No reply; Burakh puffed.
Fascinating, this was: he had never been a big cannabis smoker; he’d tried, disliked, hadn’t done it again, especially not when Andrey was supplying, for this man managed to dig up hemp and powders and recreational opium tinctures that tasted like machinery oil.
Chypre was right — oakmossy, grass-camphoraceous; voracious, lungs-opening veracious, it pulled Dankovsky closer by the throat. He walked to the bed and sat. 
Chypre was right — Cyprus, wasn’t that the name? That of Aphrodite’s, also. 
He breathed in over Burakh’s collarbones. His eyes were stuck on a set of stitches, sewn into the meat of Burakhh’s shoulder. He didn’t know how ridiculous he looked, his neck stretched out like a stork’s like that, just to catch the smell of smoke. 
Burakh was not aiming at his open mouth when he exhaled, but it reached it nonetheless. Dankovsky closed it, wetted the smoke that curled inside of it like a hazy animal. He bit into the taste of neroli. 
What a great idea! despaired the Dankovsky that was still half-aware in the back of his head. Get high and sit so close! He thought he could see the tiniest droplets of saliva cling to the white-sail smoke-arabesques, turning them into wet mist. When his eyes, with utmost difficulty and yet unbearable want, tore themselves off Burakh’s shoulder, he stared at his mouth and saw how the thinnest thread of spit stretched from lip to lip when he parted them to blow. 

The outside air, like sickness slithered through pin-holes, did just as well, thinning to liquid to ink so as to darkly creep into the attic from the world of the living, staining. A snake of cold icy daimon or draft roped itself around Daniil’s neck and he shivered. Artemy saw him shiver, his eyes darted down. The cold air vanished as if by the gaze banished and the walls began to burn quite warm. The effort of the arabesque patterns spiraling upon themselves translated as fever, ghost-machine of steam hidden in the thickness of the walls, ghost-feeling of sweat that felt to possess both Burakh and Dankovsky.
His underclothes began to feel strangling. Soon enough, his clothes too — the fine corduroy ribbing of his pants weighted, sprawling across his thighs, heavier than steel pipes. His leg twitched as he tried to move himself away. His cock twitched at the thought of Burakh reaching out to not let him. What a great idea that was! the him-with-better-judgement-in-the-back-of-his-head ironized louder. Dankovsky got up — how terrible it was to sit and think and realize it would have happened sober anyways. 

Burakh crushed the cigarette butt in the blood-stained basin. Bold, but not boisterous, he reached his hand out for Daniil. 

“May I see it?” he asked. 

Dankovsky stared at him dumbfounded, but that did not get Burakh to lower the open palm he expected his in. Dankovsky’s eyes darted at his fingers, bitten to the blood yesterday, that had grown hardened red pooling scars, his nails chewed short, the neverending itch of the back of his palm that he neverendingly scratched at night. He offered Burakh his hand.
Burakh took it, took in, observed, he raked it of his eyes up and down. Some distant relative of Thomas the Incredulous’, was he? He looked into the palm for stigmata. 
Similis similes sentiunt, inveniunt, sciscunt — same who is same feels-senses, finds-meets, seeks-searches 

“I dreamed you cut me open with this hand,” Burakh whispered so close to the cup of it. 
Dankovsy’s breath itched. “Forbidden for me isn’t it?”
“Plenty of things are forbidden. It doesn’t stop people, in this town or outside of it.”

Oooh, you’re baiting me, Burakh.
Dankovsky curled in his fingers a bit. Hand held by Burakh so close to his face, Dankovsky’s nails ended up scraping the stubble on his blood-spattered chin. 
Artemy pushed the meat of his thumb in the hollow of Daniil’s palm, in the triangle between the (L/)lines of Heart, Head and Fate, between two tender tendonridges. Pushed enough to draw the fingers in, to trigger a twinge of pain release, a groan. Daniil shivered, and Artemy watched him shiver; his eyes blue-green like flavored smoke gleamed so wonderfully. 

Then, like clockwork, or like the clock at all, striking midnight, or some odd hour of dusk, there were gunshots — loud, then screaming, panic. A commanding voice that was getting closer. 
Dankovsky closed his eyes in resignation. Breathed deeply through the nose. Burakh’s hovered over his hand. Then, he cast it a last glance, and parted with it. Dankovsky gathered himself to his feet and hurried to make himself more presentable, vest, cravat, coat gloves and all. 

“He better not be coming in,” he gritted, and Burakh stared at him, um, highly. (Dankovsky did not fare much better.) 

You dare interrupt something really important between my colleague and myself, commander, I’ll have you know that to make you pay for this I will send Ms. Ravel after you, and will not intervene this time, the Bachelor thought as he hurried downstairs. At the door, there was no one. Commanding, but no commander, then was it? Who had been leading these shouts? In the street, further down, taking the way east, a crowd had gathered. How fast and mad were the Brides, who bayed and howled at the rifles more than at the men who carried them. Where was everyone going…? The procession thickened as it moved, its venous slither clotting. 

     It was dawn, and, well, here it was, the sacrifice. Tender-hearted Iphigenia, not Iphigenia in Tauris, but Iphigenia as Taurus. Maybe the stalemate, at last, was over. Maybe Artemis’ winds would blow in his sails. And may he die upon his return, as the other prophet did, intertwined with his master, Death, master over him and over his House. He hoped at least the slaughtered bull of this Lot had not suffered, and had gone to the blade willingly; for anything else would bestow greater evils in the house that carried out the killing. (If greater evils there were to be, let them befall the killer’s family, and let the killer not be too close to Dankovsky.)

Chapter Text

     So they were out — the hounds, bloodthirsty for the she-Tower, the orders to smother she-Prometheus’ fire. The inquisitorial paper-ships were launched ‘cross sea-town, and Dankovsky—hands shaking, nape clammy—dressed himself to burn down their sails. As he ran out he heard her, the soft chiming of her mirrors, she hummed like electricity. This Titan, whose body was maze adored, was many-door’ed, able to contain Elysium and Tartarus in all of its nooks, folded-upon-itself, was threatened with the strike of a mere cast iron bullet. The injustice of it all should have been enough to raise its attributed god, wounded and mad, from the ground. But there was no god. There only was the Bachelor who, winded and maddened, hunted the couriers like a dog.

     Blueprints. Blue — cerulean, smalt, smoldered. Blue of flame like maniacal Peter dreamed. Around him blue curled like noose like snake, blue of print of ink blue Sevres, severe, severed, blue like blade — vertical cut — you —  ebb. Blueprints he should never have— blueprints he betrayed. Betrayal, blue for bruise, bruise for blueprint. Blue for begging — not at the Inquisitor’s feet, like a baying bloodhound nose buried under dirt bellowing, white belly shown and opened. Begging the blueprinted herself — he had promised, he had promised… 
Who’s the thug who’s got her orders? Who is it? May he reveal himself, step in, step forth, no harm shall be done to him, if he just fucking steps in, the light can’t be too bright. Runs after him out of stage left, where it is bad luck to do so. 

“You!” Shouts, is not obeyed. The mad stops not for the maddened. 

Fear in prey's eyes, who is not prey, but is run after in a same way. Begging on Dankovsky's lips, blessings — not as efficient as if he was not hunting that man down. Blessing then curses, then threats. Tower deserves all. Tower all that is left. Tower apotropaic, Tower à-propos, Tower life-distilling alembic. Tower-shelter, spleen and liver, Tower protector. 

“Hand these papers over.”
“Are you quite nuts?!”

More than nuts, he is shell. Tower—there's a man in there! There a man-ether, man-seer, mirrors inside focus like in a rebirth-pyre. Tower shell, as he is shell, like as like, shell with a man in there. 

“Hand them over!”

The Shelter is no temple. The courier is no supplicant, and even if he was, Dankovsky does not answer to the gods he’d beg to. The place is empty — people must’ve heard of the scene to come.
Doesn’t have it in him to beg. It might have gone differently if he had. 

“... Was it worth it?” — Burakh. His eyes, usually this so lovely verdigris color, were poisoned in their depth with madness, bitterness red and unbridled — same felt same. No psalm singing the Tower’s praises would change his mind; not in this state, not in any other. Burakh didn’t deal in psalms and praises. 
“Is anything, now?” — him, that despaired smile clinging onto what’s left of his human face, the silver mask melting off. 
“You don’t want to sustain that building’s life for selfless reasons. It is not true belief that makes you want to keep it standing. It is disheartenment, disheartenment and misery, and grief.”

He spoke so quietly, and yet his voice tore through Dankovsky like a cannon shot — ah! just so he waits! oh, but spare him, oh spare him. (This was true, wasn’t it? Same knows same.)

“You won't take me onto the depths of despair with you,” Burakh continued. “Wallow and pity. I won't follow.” 
“Who do you think you're kidding, Burakh?” blood-handed Dankovsky sighed, and neither his breath nor his stare could sustain unshaken the look of Burah. “I know you don't sleep. You twist and turn, you thrash around, you stay awake listening to the breathing of people outside, because your senses have gotten so keen with worry that that's something you can do now. But what you can't do is lie to me. We're too alike for me to believe you.”

Bravado. It had only been bravado, a forward and blunt matchstrike of aggressive luck, which Dankovsky had no backup plans for if his bluff was called — but Burakh ticked. Aggressive, blind luck, but it had struck him across the face. Dankovsky watched as clouds overcast his features, his brows furrowed, worry-plough sinking deeper between them, his mouth twisting sourly. 

“We are alike,” Burakh eventually spoke. “I’ve seen the depths of despair you’re thinking of sinking off to. I’ve been there. You haven’t seen it. You cannot know.” He straightened, inhaled. His hands twitched — what, with a strangling urge? Don’t make me laugh. But do go through with it, at last. “Hear this, if it brings you the last hint of joy my words can bring: I believe that tower is alive as much as you do. I simply do not value its single life over those of so many others.”

Fucking hell, it was all meaningless of an attempt, wasn’t it? The Tower fed, allowed, bellowed, protected. The Tower was (a) reflection, balance. Capital R Reflection, capital B Balance — ancestral deities, like Vengeance, Justice of Victory, that soared above, equally as old as those that lingered below. 
What good was it to tell Burakh in the ways one would tell a close, intimate friend? Where had opening up ever led Dankovsky? (To the godstone, on top of it, the table of autopsy.) He had made his mind in the way Dankovsky had made his. Same, battering-ram, crushes against same.

“Smart of me to burn these papers, I reckon,” Dankovsky sighed. “Had I chewed and swallowed them, you’d have cut me open to fish them back out.” (At that he felt a shiver crawl between his skin and the damp linen of his shirt. Crawl where he could imagine a cut. Where he thought he remembered it.)
Burakh’s eyes soured with a squint, sharpened, grew silver like blade. “I would have. You know me so well. Better than I do you.”
“You taunt me, Burakh, like I don't have a loaded gun.”
“You say this, Daniil, like you think I'd believe you could shoot me.”

He brought his hand to the leather pouch at the front of his tunic. Dankovsky’s spine stung him straight. 

“But it wouldn’t have been necessary anyways,” Burakh said, Burakh so bitterly victorious, sibilant in a way only Dankovsky thought himself rotten enough to sound. 

He pulled malediction out of the pocket — he held up a copy of the orders. 
Dankovsky felt a click at the side of his skull, as if his jaw had come undone. A cold wave washed over his face, ebbing back with all the blood and light in it. His mouth fell open. 

“... You were supposed to get these later.”
“Oynon, I know how the story goes.” He observed a somber pause, and corrected himself: “I know how the story ends.”

Oh, how Dankovsky hated these words coming from his mouth. And last time, last time he’d said them, which was not the first last time, he’d grabbed his hand, he’d tugged him into light. But now, now, which was only now because it had already been, one of his hands was full, for it held the papers out like a surrendering flag, and the other was empty, for he held it out before his chest, warding Dankovsky off. 

“Where did you get this?”
“It does not matter.”

(It did not.)

“Why have you even come here, then?” Dankosvky spat, the venom rising to his palate with outrage, with the terrible fury of being taunted.
“Because I wanted to see you.”

(What the fuck do you reply to such a thing?)

“Burakh, I will calmly ask you to please, let us talk over this.”
“We already have. You have made your mind as much as I have made mine.”

This was true. 

“... And you are not calm.”

This was also true. Burakh couldn’t have been more right — Dankovsky threw the rifle on the ground and lunged at him. Struck out, grabbed elbow. Curled himself around it like snake trying to crush a windpipe. 

“Oy— hands off!”

No use. Burakh pushed him off and bolted to the door — not fast enough (not willing enough) for Dankovsky caught up in a strike. Burakh grabbed Dankovsky’s hand grabbing him grabbing his, tugging at cloth tearing at coat pushing, pushing again, Dankovsky managed to corner Burakh against the door but he’d shoved the orders in a pocket, one under the hip-flap of the tunic, and Dankovsky saw red, so red, he boiled, if he had to punch this guy in the groin for these orders he’d do it, by god he’d do it, as he attempted to think of a plan Burakh shoved him away. Dankovsky stumbled but charged forward right back, hound at the leg of a wounded deer, bark, no bite, jaw still weak, bark and spit, hound closer to mutt, mutt, weakened by an unbearable sadness. Burakh caught his wrists and squeezed, keeping his hands away from his face. The memory of Burakh pulling Dankovsky out of the Abattoir shot right through the arm and he almost dropped it right then.

“Oynon, I'm stronger than you,” Burakh spat, tightening the hold on his wrists.
“Like hell you are,” Dankovsky barked back, damned dog, damnation-dog, bloodhound with no more blood to hound. 

He kicked Burakh in the shin, made him yelp and jerk his knee up; he scythed the other leg at the ankle and Burakh collapsed down, then back. He dragged Dankovsky down with him, to the depths, HA! these depths of despair he said he didn’t want to dwell in! who’s laughing now! nobody is! Of all his weight Dankovsky collapsed over Burakh and, as he held his hands out to catch himself and not bash his own face against the floor on his way down, Burakh grabbed him by both sides of the collar to keep him away. 

“Enough,” Burakh groaned, “enough—”

and suddenly a pin-dot of red struck him on the cheek, right below his blue eye. 
Dankovsky heard him gasp, and felt him freeze; he did so too. 
Another one, bigger, dripped from somewhere and crashed itself next to the corner of his lips. Where…? Dankovsky watched what looked like his own blood rain, scarce and soft, on Burakh’s face. He closed his mouth, slowly; it did not stop the raining. 
He palmed at his eyes, his hairline, his mouth, all dry. It hit the back of his wrist, on the thin strip of exposed skin. Nosebleed. 
What was he to do? One of his hands on the floor was holding him up. Weakly. Maybe Burakh’s hand, which gripped the collar of his shirt on the opposite side, was keeping him up equally. His other hand, all he could do, was press it to the nose. That wouldn’t stop the bleeding. He couldn’t — he couldn’t stand, that’d let Burakh get away, he couldn’t sit back for the same reason, and also because Burakh’s thighs were just behind him. He — stared — something — watched as Burakh’s face — who for a second before he hadn’t recognized — mellowed. Mellowed with pity, terribly, heartbreakingly so. 
Burakh, slowly, pushed him away, wiggled out from under him, then helped him on his knees, on his feet again. Dankovsky stepped back, legs unsteady, mellowed, beaten metal. Blood was heavy as lead and pulled his face to the ground. He hadn’t noticed a kid had walked in and Burakh was holding out the papers for him to take. 
Dankovsky watched in utter bewilderment. Who…? Who the hell? The Shelter was not territory of the children. Notkin? Didn't look like him. Or maybe did. Madness clouded gaze and judgement like the smoke of burning offerings. He wouldn’t have the time to retrieve his rifle. What? What?! he couldn’t shoot a kid! Not in front of Burakh! — was he not there, would he have? Would that kid be worthy sacrifice for the Tower? Would then the winds blow strong in the Bachelor’s sails? How could he even think like this?
He turned to Burakh. His blue eyes had darkened with resignation and sorrow.

“Filth that you are,” Dankovsky struggled to mutter, strangled, “you’ve cheated. Twice now.”
“Filth that you’ve become,” Burakh replied more firmly — the animosity in his voice was for custom’s sake. Pain mellowed his words. “You cannot cheat my mother for this long.”
“What does your mother have to do with this?!” Dankovsky spat out.
“You’re bleeding all over her.” He looked down, where the ground was only packed soil, not even covered of tile or boards. “And you’re not even making the flowers grow.”

Dankovsky stood there, stone-turned. Shock cold through him. He watched as the kid folded the crumbled papers and bolted out. Dankovsky watched him run. A whole kennel of hounds was baying in his legs, begging to go after him. But he didn't. 
Burakh approached Dankovsky. He took his hands at the wrists, and as the Bachelor’s legs gave out from under him, he crouched, and kneeled down with him. Were Burakh not just in front of him, Dankovsky would have bashed his head against the floor. But he was. So when he fell forward, Burakh put his hands on his shoulders, and guided the Bachelor’s hollowed-out chest ‘til it pressed against his. Burakh didn’t… really do anything. His hands were more or less at his sides. His head was more or less straight. He let Dankovsky sink into him, sink until his neck hurt from being craned over Burakh’s shoulder. 

They stayed like this for a while. For so long, in fact, that evening came, and when it did, the cannon went off. Artemy held Daniil. A single, loud howl rang out like a gunshot, and Dankovsky recognized Peter’s voice. He turned away. He tucked his head against Artemy’s throat. Smeared his blood all over. 

“Did it have to be this way?” Dankovsky asked, his voice empty as mist. “Was there really no other?”
“Not in this story,” Burakh replied. “Not for us. Terrible things happen to good people.”

Dankovsky bitterly smiled. 
“But you and I are not good people.”
“And thank god for that. Can you imagine what would've happened to us if we were?”

     Dankovsky felt Burakh shift under him. He moved his arms, which before hanged limp like helpless oars at his sides. He was careful not to inadvertently push Dankovsky off with an unwanted shove. Dankovsky watched as Burakh’s hands, peppered with scabs like burgundy dewdrops, rose to the sides of his face. They stilled, and when Dankovsky did not budge, closed in. The hollows of his palms flattened against the hollows of Dankovsky’s cheeks.
And he liked it. Plenty of things he was, murderer included, but not a liar, not in this instant, not to himself. He liked the feeling of Burakh's hands on the sides of his face, Burakh's ruddy hands where color had drained off his cheeks. 
He must've looked pathetic, because Burakh's eyebrows rose with sympathy. Pathos, pathos, what misery. Once all the threads of the tragedy have unraveled, justice and death and payment for acts and acts of justice and acts of death finally at last laid like a net over the scene, all there is to do is sit there, in silence, in the tightrope-walk moment before applause reveals the artifice. But applause never came. 
He tore his face from Burakh's pitying grasp—no, that's not even true. He hitched his head back just a bit and Burakh lowered his hands immediately. Oh, letting him go. And still standing back up with him. On his death-cold face, Dankovsky could feel the hot trail of blood from his nose pooling around his mouth, dripping from his chin. His legs wobbled as he stood up and his head spun. Burakh offered his hand but Dankovsky didn't take it.

“Looking like I've punched you,” Burakh whispered, as if afraid too loud a noise could send Dankovsky to these feared despair-depths, at last.
“Might have felt better,” Dankovsky wryly replied. 
“… I mean I still can, if it makes you happy.”

Tempting. 

“Nah. I want to go see the ruins. Pull that door, will you?”

He willed. Dankovsky stepped outside and waited for Burakh after him.

     They walked to the Tower’s carcass. Dankovsky started crying silently. Grossly pooling at the corners of his nostrils and below his mouth, tears thinned out the blood, but spread it out too. The Brides were singing; this was no dirge. This was the exodos. 

By the carcass, ashgrey, inkblack, paper-skin torn like an écorchée, her skeleton scrambled like a shipwreck's mast, still smelling of smoke like sacrificial meat, a big hole where her heart should be, Peter and Andrey roamed, these empty-handed choephoroi. Andrey’s nose had been bleeding. Thrashing with grief, Peter had knocked into it of his head. Andrey held no grudge, of course. Squatting for rest, he had a hand on his brother's back, brother crumbled, lying face-first on the ground, slobbering on the dirt that had taken his most precious. 
Dankovsky stayed back, just a bit. Less than its complete disappearance, it was the lingering ghost of the Polyhedron that haunted him. Dust particles still hung inside of its shape like bodies on the gallows, drawing the edges of its carcass like they had consciously memorized where it once stood. There was a hole in the shape of his salvation torn in the black cloak of night; blacker indeed than the black around it, its fuzzy edges softening not the violence of the tearing. It looked as if the sky was concave where the Tower had been ripped away from the canvas of it, swallowing the ghost of the Polyhedron in despair, in a pit bigger and blacker than despair. Dankovsky only realized blood had poured from the now-broken base when he watched as Burakh approached the red flood. 
He bent, lowered his arm. He waited ‘til blood pooled in the cup of his hand, then raised it to his mouth. He drank. 
As he turned back and his eyes oh, his lovely verdigris-blue eyes, they themselves were these so-feared pits of despair, noosed of exhausted and bruised purple, the lower half of his face was, like Dankovsky's, covered in blood. Filth recognizes filth. 

“You look like shit, Burakh,” Dankovsky wisped out.
“Thank you, you don't look too bad either.”

Andrey, from where he crouched, clicked his tongue disapprovingly.

“No flirting in front of my brother’s daughter’s corpse,” he hissed. 
“Sorry,” Burakh hissed back. “Won’t happen again.”

And he left. And he left Dankovsky to see the carnage for himself. Oh, Dankovsky despaired so quietly, oh polyhedral Prométhée, who could have given fire and reason to man had you been allowed to… But the carrion bird of cannon came for you, polyhedral Prométhée, and out tore liver, organ of hubris, alongside everything else. This carrion bird was not divine, and sought no punishment, and it might have been better if it did, for you could have been reborn, if only to die again. Why was rebirth only afforded to men of flesh as punishment, and not to such a wonder as a gift? 
The blood-gift below had bubbled out as grief does, and had glutted out into the waters, climbing the grey banks; and it looked like the Tower had been bled out. Struck at the throat, where the sacrificial blade lands. 

“I've heard you killed to try to stop this from happening,” Andrey interrupted his misery.

Oh, he did. Some hundreds of years ago, when the world still had a chance of spinning. 

“Didn't matter in the end, did it?”
“Didn't. But I am glad you killed to try to stop this from happening.”

Dankovsky puah!’d in disgust — not at Andrey, for bloodlust was in his nature like hubris was in other’s; not even at himself, not the himself who, bloodtears dripping down his chin as if hitting the seconds of a clock, stood there with his arms at his sides. Disgust at the him who believed it could have all been stopped with killing. Who—for such a horrifying second he could see his own monstrous face be cast a cruel shadow upon—considered grabbing his rifle and turning its barrel on a boy-courier. Because this was not the first time, was it? Inside of this story was nestled another; spiral in spiral, tale in tale. Serpent bites tail. If it could have been stopped, because he intimately believed it could have, killing was not what would have done it. What, then? He didn't know. Killing marred man like it marred story. And this was a story about killing. 

The smell of powder lingered, overpowering almost that of blood and rot. As Peter wailed, Dankovsky walked back to his attic in a daze. The cannon had torn off the Tower’s liver, organ-of-hubris, and blown out his brain, organ-of-worse. He crawled back to the attic. There was no noise, not even his own footsteps.  

.❊.

     He ran the faucet. Water was clean. Mockingly so. Oh, water of the haunted house’s so pure, while the river is soiled with sacrificial blood, isn’t it funny? It wasn’t. (The house had no business in this. Dankovsky was just feeling targeted.) He gathered cold water in his cupped hand and washed his mouth and chin of it. Stubble scraped the inside of his palm. He winced — he had not let it get “this bad” since some of his madder Thanatica stunts. A last red drop dripped from his nose, and he rinsed it off and out as well. As he patted his lower face dry with a towel that already had blood (his own, maybe, or maybe not) on it, he caught Burakh’s silhouette out of the corner of his eye. He stood at the threshold, leaning against the doorframe. 

“I expected you,” Dankovsky admitted.
“I know you did. That’s why I came.”

Dankovsky thought he’d have liked him to come after he figured out how to twist a tissue paper into his nostril, but that would have to do. 

“Any sensation of pressure in your face or teeth?” Burakh asked. “Have you had this from the twyre pollen before?”

Hah, Dankovsky snickered to himself, he was trying to assess him for sinusitis or allergies — to explain the nosebleed.

“No,” he replied. “I think it just was triggered by the stress.”
“Can't imagine why,” Burakh said, forcing lightness on his tongue from the depths of his strained throat. “You've had an uneventful few days.”

And Dankovsky laughed. Chuckled at first, then laughter struck out of his throat, through the sacrificial wound. He laughed until he bent over the basin, gripping its sides. Burakh laughed as well, not as hard — he had come closer to catch him if he let go of the edges of the sink. Dankovsky waved him closer. Closer. Burakh obeyed. Dankovsky stepped to the side to let Burakh wash the blood off his face. 

“Growing the beard out, oynon?” Burakh asked as he wiped his neck dry.
Dankovsky grimaced. “No intention. I need to shave. Before I leave—before I do anything else.”

He rummaged through his toiletries for shaving cream. Finding the container full, he felt a heart-pinch, remembering how he had expected to spend his days upon his arrival: he had prepared himself for a week of good talks, of going to bed mindful and interested, of thoughtfully keeping his hair clean and his face clean-shaved. He lathered the cream on. 
He took hold of the razor; opened it with a pinch of the fingers. What an opaque sentence that had been, and how alarming of a gesture that must have looked: it had came out more worrying that Dankovsky had meant it, for Burakh’s eyebrow drew a worried plough between them as he said: 

“Your hand shakes.”
“And your leg buckles,” remarked Dankovsky.
“You should let me handle that razor.”
“And you should sit.”
“Let us sit, then. Hand me the blade.”
“Let us.”

This felt better than calling each other filth, did it not? Barter. Banter. Back-and-forth. Breeze swaying between the same two cypresses, unsteadily tethered to the soil. Dankovsky would have loved to barter for the Polyhedron’s life, but it was too late now. 
Burakh swung around the chair he'd grabbed, shoved in a corner and upon which Dankovsky had thrown his coat and vest. Dankovsky sat. He had to keep his legs apart for Burakh to pull a second chair between them, and resting his back on the chair’s didn’t feel too comfortable. He braced his hands on his thighs and hesitantly pushed his chin into Artemy’s open palm. 

“Do you not trust me with a blade?”Artemy teased.
“I do, Burakh. Maybe a little bit too much.”
“If I had wanted to slit your throat, I'd have used something else. Something bent and rusty.”

Dankovsky raised his brows in amusement, bewilderment at the bluntness and, frankly, incitement.

“Hey, you're the punctilious one,” Burakh shrugged. “I'm just the butcher who does the dirty work. Or does his work dirtily, however you see it.”
“Do not denigrate yourself like that in front of me. I will kick you out if you do it again.”

Burakh kept himself from doing it again — understanding came as such: he wanted to stay. He wanted to keep his hand on Dankovsky’s skin, his blade-handling fingers brushing across it. 
The blade was sharp, thin, provocative, predatorous, sweeping the cheek clean of stubble like a saber-tooth. Burakh’s hand was not-quite on his neck, the pinch of thumb and index holding the underneath of his jaw — no squeezing, no pressure, a hand light and shy almost kept Dankovsky still and moved his chin slowly as he worked. 
Overcome with a boldness he thought had left him, Dankovsky rested his chin on the back of that hand.

“Expect me to hold you up?” Burakh snickered. 
“You already do.”

Could same say of same? Dankovsky owed the man. If he decided to l(i/ea)ve, he’d owe the man. If he decided to blow his brains out, he’d owe the man also, and this debt would course him down the banks of the Styx. 

“You trust me an awful lot with this,” Burakh mused. “Like I don't have a blade to your jugular.”

The familiarity of the wording sunk Dankovsky’s heart right through his stomach. But the answer didn’t even have to be mulled over.

“You say this, Artemy, like you think I'd believe you could cut me with it.”

Burakh hummed. In contemplation, first. Then he continued, and it began sounding like a melody. 

His touch was warm. His nails were hard and strong, the white edges just a bit longer than Daniil thought he kept them usually, but he was excused, for he had way more on his mind this past week. Daniil noticed the nails because they scratched very gently the underside of his jaw, the yew-bushes of his growing sideburns that he hadn’t covered of shaving cream. Because, of that free hand, they levered the silver edge under his pin and took it, then the cravat with it.
Burakh didn’t speak. Dankovsky watched how the red silk flowed over the back of his strong, scarred hand. He wondered how the skin would feel to the touch of lips in the cloth's wake. Soft tissue, torn from him. 
Burakh swept the blade across the grey place of the Bachelor’s drained cheeks one last time, and he was a brand new man again, which meant he was just as he had been, but finally clean-shaven once more. Burakh finished cleaning his face off with a towel. Patted it against the sides of his neck, in the wide-open hollow left by the cravat Dankovsky had let him take. 

“If you’ll allow me to be so bold,” Burakh murmured.
“I’ll. I do. Be, for I—you have no idea how much I want to.”
“What stops you?”
“If I move, Burakh, I’m afraid I’ll come apart.”
“Run away?”
“No. Shatter in place, which should tell you how much I have no intention of running away.”
“Tells me enough.”

The towel whipped against the sink’s edge as Burakh threw it, and the razor’s blade chimed in the basin like a silver fish after it. Burakh leaned in. Bent the knee like a supplicant. 
He brought his hands to the sides of Daniil’s now-clean face, as he had done before, and as Daniil had liked. Seeing Burakh wobble in his awkwardly crouched position, Daniil stood up, a bit fast maybe, almost making Burakh knock his chair behind him, coming closer but not closing the gap.
Burakh hesitated, neither from guilt nor shame, it seemed, or any other of those covert gut-twist storms that agitated men who thought too long about such predicaments. What stopped him, Dankovsky was not too sure, but as Artemy positioned his hands over his jaw, closer to his neck, Daniil figured he just wanted to make sure he wanted it as much. And what an euphemistic way of putting it it’d be to say that Daniil wanted it just as much. 
Desire threatened to cut a way out of him, to tear through his ribcage, to slice his way out of him from the throat down. It was getting restless and relentless in the cage of his ribs; it was pacing like an animal. It was clawing at the walls of his entrails and lungs from the depths of himself. It tried to spill through every possible orifice like disease building up: Dankovsky couldn’t open his mouth without fearing his words would escape him, couldn't reach out a hand without feeling it would move on its own. But reaching out was what he did. He fought himself like trying to contain a wild horse. That didn’t work. He threw his arms around Burakh’s shoulders, pulling out of him a small wince which made him immediately reposition them, and gracelessly pushed their faces together. 
Artemy tasted like herbs, pungently, not as bitter as he was sweet.

“Is that twyre I taste on your lips?” Dankovsky asked. 
“Twyre and swevery.”
“Drunk, are we?”
“No. I wouldn’t dare come to you this way.”

And, to reinforce his point, he gave a methodical, mathematical, ever-so-slightly fettered kiss. 

“Twyrine brewed the traditional way,” he continued, “decocted slowly in boiling water only.”

Dankovsky sought the warmth of his mouth — made a prying attempt to get a taste of the honey he used in that drink, and felt how Burakh welcomed him in warmly. 
It was almost cruel, how easy kissing Artemy was. How mocking of Dankovsky’s fear of it. Artemy was simple, not particularly sensual, but they kept finding ways in which they fit together, revelled in it, shifted ever so slightly to find new ones. They parted, and Artemy, without leaving of his hands Daniil’s heated skin he had decided on touching, took a few steps back; and Daniil, without leaving of his arms Artemy’s he had found confident enough of a grip on, pattered in following until he was the one guiding them out of the room. He still was too prideful to ask Artemy to kiss him again; he didn’t need to. His wide hot palm had moved, they rested against the notch of his clavicles, harmless, candid, shy. Dankovsky parted his lips and pulled him in. Moth, beetle in jar, agitated, explorative. 
Daniil softened — he thought himself discreet, but Artemy felt it — he was becoming numb of jaw, his arms were becoming tired from their crushing embrace around his shoulders. Burakh welcomed the way Dankovsky’s hands flowed from shoulder to cheek, cradled his face gently. He followed when Daniil, suddenly alive as if struck by lightning, gave him slow, supple kisses, savoring the aftertaste, the content bliss of satiation.
Artemy broke off the kiss, turned his head to check he was not about to hit a wall, the wooden folding screen, or trip over a pile of books, kissed Daniil again. Broke the kiss off again, turned his head to check he was not about to hit a wall a divider a pile of books, and kissed him again. The back of his knees hit the bed, and he stared at Dankovsky with big blue eyes basically begging to push him onto it, which Daniil did. 

When the theatre’s empty, and the set-grave is gone, and the masks have been hanged back on the wall, and the attic has gone cold, and the house might have a ghost in it, and the Gorkhon keeps washing itself pink of the bloodglut, and the shed blood’s forever shed, and the dead stay that way too, they found nothing worse to do than to have sex. Nothing better, either. Daniil leans over lying Artemy and brings his lips to him anywhere they can reach, butcher-Tantalus dunking his head into freshwater and drinking, bringing his mouth to ripe fruit and biting, and swallowing. 

     On his back, without a pillow to prop his head up, it lolls back, it reveals the whole stretch of his throat that Artemy reveres, Daniil thinks with his body; for once; for last; at last; at least. He thinks with/by/about/thanks to/because of/with the help of/with the grace of his hands, bare; his legs, bare also; his arms that are touched gently, the hair on them combed through with delicateness. Touched like something precious, fragile, almost — which he would be offended by, maybe, if just these fingertips didn’t feel like the touch of lightning. He thinks with/by/about/thanks to/because of/with the help of/with the grace of his heated cheeks, meeting Artemy’s, scratching the stubble Burakh is not as bothered by as he was of his own; with his mouth that feels the electric shock of tongue against tongue and the languid, rolling thunder of a slack-jaw kiss.
The drop of spit, cold as a needle soft as a kiss, slithers out from his mouth down. Dankovsky pulls back, sees and watches, pushes himself back in, catching it whole, licking the skin, swallowing thickly, and Burakh holds him closer, closer, until his arms feel like they could break through Dankovsky’s ribcage. Past the thrill of his closeness—no, not past, beyond the thrill, this is more true, there is no boundary-border-barrier there is not an after, there is not a cut, there is the continuation, the endlessly unending sustenance of it.
Unending; from his mouth, to Burakh’s; a litany of his words that they both know are words and neither can decipher — tongues spoken between the two of them. Words that overflow, overspill, extend themselves beyond their welcome, and welcome follows to accommodate them; words like libations, like those poured over his own grave, which is probably somewhere out there, in the steppe, where reader-weeper would come bend and wail. But he’s not thinking about that too much right now; he’s thinking about Burakh, who bends, and doesn’t weep and doesn’t wail, and who melts words, libations, at the back of his tongue, they come spilling out as spit. 
A sacrament taken kneeling. That’s what Daniil is thinking about. Being taken kneeling, like he is the saint being prayed to. With a leg thrown over Burakh’s shoulder, sinking into the mattress, Dankovsky feels himself melted votive on the altar, open body on the autopsy table — body on the altar, votive on the table, flame alive, hungry with prayer, kindled and stoked. Well, then, he thinks it’s not quite right to push that on Burakh. When he tells him, Burakh says then:

       “Ah… I do mind. Maybe I do. But I’ll mind it more later. Not now…”

No worship — adoration. Daniil’s spine stretches and on that bed he’s horizon. Long taut blurring boundary between sky that his eyes are pinned to and earth into which he sinks, into which Burakh cradles and kisses and touches him into sinking. 

Limb-loosener of a man of his hands of his kisses of his embarrassingly appreciable reverence, filling Dankovsky’s arms with cotton, with beads, making him fall limp with awe, then tense with want again. 

Having hated God enough to kill him of a rapier strike, straight through the flank, tearing the stomach out as it was pinned, making God bleed; and now loving enough to let him—no God, no god, just a man, one he loves—to want him to strike, blade of ecstasy right through the diagram, between the lungs, pinning him like a moth, through where he's soft and fleshy, red and supple, warm skin malleable under gentle hands. 
"Do something, do something" — an impatient, an uneasy insect squirm. Wriggle of beetles-legs. 
Do something—anything but come, not now, not yet. 

"Fuck, Burakh, fuck—"
"I'm trying," he says, prompt, jovial, agitated, and Dankovsky bursts out laughing, laughs for what feels like all of the time there ever was and then some, fully, heartily, until he's breathless, until he can crack his eyes open again and Burakh above is smiling widely, wildly, deconcerted but joyful.  

.❊.

     It’s dawn. Why should they leave? What is there outside for them? The same ruin(s) as yesterday, the same carcass(es) that ha(s/ve)n’t been washed away. Daniil is not done wanting; Artemy is not done wanting for him to want, and vice-versa; hence why, in bitter memory of the Tower who could hide man, they men hide in the nook between night and morning, and carry on. 

It's not about towering over him, or if it is, the tower has fallen. Fallen but stayed intact, its walls molded and melted by the shape of earth under it, flesh-earth, with a same earthy, clay tone as it is reddened with a flush, with the heartbeat battering the skin like waves do shores. It's not about towering over him, even though from where he is, hands on each side of Burakh’s shoulders, legs knotted together, intertwined from the waist down like a pit of two snakes, he does feel like he towers. It might be about two columns that the storm knocked off their bases and who lie like wounded beasts by each other's side; who lie atop each other like two strata of a same earth.
“Easy, boy,” Dankovsky says, almost reflexively, as if to tame an animal. Burakh’s nails dig into his flanks as if to remind him they're made of the same animal meat — same wound muscles, same warm hide under the fingers, same soft fur, Artemy’s the color of copper and Daniil’s of obsidian, that bristles with goosebumps — and that neither of them are boys anymore. “Easy… let me…”
Even though Dankovsky wasn't sure what he asked him to, Burakh let him. Not because there was anything to let, and not because he was towering over him. But because they were intertwined from the waist like a pit of two snakes, and if they got a little closer like Burakh nudged him to, they could be from the mouth down. Carrying on.   

.❊.

     It was morning. The smell of blood had not receded, but it had dulled. Instead of the scent of copper permeating every pore of Dankovsky’s body, and those of the walls, the wax of candles and the curtains too, it shared stage with that of pungent soil, and vaguely of sewers; some lock on the river must have been shaken by the cannon fire and spat out stale water.
Dankovsky sat at the edge of the bed. He enjoyed how Burakh traced some blue vein on his thigh, on the inside of his thigh, nonchalantly, still half-groggy under the heavy cloak of sleep. He sat and watched out of the window, where the barred oculus opened on a world missing a Titan that could have held up the sun, had she been left to.

“... Are you regretting not having spent the night with your fellows?” Burakh eventually asked, voice woolen with sleep still. 

Dankovsky went around the attic, looking for his socks and garters that Burakh had, at some point and after all the rest was gone, flung across the room. 

“It would have been way worse of a night, wouldn’t it?” He bent to pick up garter, but no sock; then sock, but no garter. “… Had you not shown up, oh, trust I'd have wallowed. Might even have gone and gotten so drunk that Andrey’s wicked samogon delivered me from grief at last.”

Burakh’s face soured.

“… Hey, this is not a comment on my current feelings,” Dankovsky attempted to reassure him. (He put his socks on.) “But I’d be lying if I didn’t want to join them today. To commiserate.” He found his union suit, which was missing two buttons over the chest. He turned to Burakh. “Join me.”

He didn’t say join us — he was not sure who would be here, who in grief, who in bliss. For a second, he thought himself cruel: wasn’t it, to ask Burakh to come see the people he had evidently so deeply hurt? See Peter again, who had thrown himself to the ground as if he wanted himself interred upon the sight of his creation destroyed? 
Burakh raised an uncertain and vaguely worried eyebrow. 

“If I show up in front of the Architect, I’m somewhat afraid his brother will jump on my ass.”

Dankovsky bit his tongue, for he really wanted to say something cheeky. But the time was not one for self-control, so he said it anyways: 

“Fear not, I’ll tell him I’ve handled that already.”

Burakh barked at him and flailed his arm around trying to land a playful hit on his ass. Dankovsky laughed like it was the funniest thing he had ever done. He was laughing still as he gathered the rest of his clothes, laughing as he buttoned the fly over his carefully tucked-in shirt. Once he was dressed, however, he felt grief grow like a groundswell. It rose from a twisted knot of his intestine, rose to the stomach and the throat like retching. 

“Apologies,” he blurted out at a confused Burakh, waving his concern off with a hand.

He tried to say it again to keep Burakh, who’d gotten up from the bed, away. It didn’t make it past his lips. Through gritted teeth, he felt grief-tears scrape down his previously so-thoroughly-kissed cheeks. Burakh stood in front of him. Brought his hands to his arms, then to his elbows, nudging them forward. Dankovsky let him wrap his own arms around him. 

“I’ll come with,” Burakh said, “if you promise to not let that dog of a man bite me.”
“He’s got a loud bark,” Dankovsky smiled sourly, “but does not bite nearly as often as you think he does.”
“Respectfully—”
“I won’t try to convince you.”

Burakh let out a comically loud sigh of relief. 

     Let the masks line the wall. Let the stage be swept of its dust. Andrey, and Peter, and Yulia, and Eva wearing Yulia’s coat, her eyes grey as if the tower’s sacrifice had bled the color from them, sat in silence. It was obvious who had drunk, and who hadn’t. Andrey was keen-eyed and keen-nosed, keen-feeling too, shoving himself in words against Burakh like a blade. He hadn’t drunk, but was not sober. Of Peter was left a shape, vaguely in that of a body, curled up like a larva under his coat. Death of soul leaves death of spirit in its wake. Not even the gold of Agamemnon’s funeral mask could have covered the sorrow on their faces. Even more so since it wasn’t really Agamemnon’s. But that made for a better story, didn’t it? 
Dankovsky, sitting with them, felt his lungs fill with a comfort unfair and perverse at the anguish that seeped in through the thickness of the walls from outside, and seeped out into the blood-stained town from inside — he was amongst kin, this silent chorus of weepers. In equal manner was he glad he didn’t spend the night with them, drowning in this sea of heartbreak, and instead spent it having sex with Burakh. Such sorrow after sex he felt ready to handle, indeed it soothed this profound unshakeable itch he had, and that he had felt guilty over when it did not disappear even under Burakh’s caresses; such sorrow in the evening of the last day, with nothing but the image of the murdered Polyhedron hanging before his eyes, well, frankly, he might have blown his brains out over.  
Shed blood’s forever shed, innumerable tears too. The dead stay that way too, this bloodshed possessive, haunting, this one indeed the Bachelor’s blood, and the Bachelor’s shed. 

“Grief takes time,” Burakh whispered.
“… Says you.”

Dankovsky watched as Burakh’s eyes welled with tears. 

“Yes. Says me.”

     The lair stank of blood. Not bull-blood, not man-blood; the soaked emanation of the earth-wound, gathered at the banks of the river like water for laundry. An ichor Burakh could wash his hands with, but could never wash his hands of. Sticky spotted Dankovsky coming in first, but made no noise to avert Burakh, who sat back-bent, head-hung, limp-armed, and did not hear him. The kid scattered away with a sort of knowing pout that did not make Dankovsky feel particularly comfortable. Nevertheless, with him gone, Daniil could approach Artemy. He put a hand on his shoulder — Burakh twitched, but did not jump.  

“Weren’t you packing your bags?”
“Done with it, dear Burakh. I hadn’t come with much. I was not expecting to stay.”
“Right. The town kept you in.”
“The town and the people…”

Burakh nodded somewhat absently. A smile still agitated the corner of his lips. 

“Why have you come here?” he eventually asked.
“To help you.”
“With what?”

Dankovsky pointed at the brewery which, steaming and heaving, percolating loudly, looked more like an alchemist’s tool than a doctor’s. 

“You are going to need to bring vials of that remedy to the Theatre, are you not? Gift upon those who can still be gifted upon that theriaca of yours…”
Burakh snorted. “Does not contain nearly enough opium to be considered a theriac.”
“Are those the same as the one you’ve given me?”
“The same.”
“Huh. Well, it sure felt like it did.”
Burakh grunted out a laugh. “Whatever that blood is, it could be an untapped source of nature’s laudanum, for all I know.”
“You don’t know much about that blood, do you?”

Sensitive subject. Stinging like sword does wounded corrida-bull.

“I know basically nothing. And yet somehow, that’s enough.”

His shoulders rounded as he slouched. He closed his eyes and struggled to reopen them. Standing by him, Dankovsky listened to the soft hisses, and clings, and chimes of the brewery. It made the noise of a tiny city, breathing out smoke just the same. Machine, and machinery, and machination of progress. This copper witch-cauldron had beat him. Better than to be changed into a pig, as far as witch encounters went. But he’d be lying if he said it didn’t hurt just the same — actually, maybe more, for he still had all of his head to mull over and silently wail. 

“Are those all ready to be given to the sick?” Dankovsky eventually asked, pointing at a dozen vials lined up by a wall. 
“They are. I’ll put them all into a wheelbarrow when they’re all done, or something… and go to the Theatre.”
“I can bring this first batch there and distribute it already. The sooner we start getting people out of the Theatre, the better it’ll be. Some of the sick are still sitting on the steps.”

Burakh turned to him. 

“… So you’re gonna run across town from here to over there? Then what, back again? Didn’t you say doing this for this town’s rulers pissed you off?”

Say? He did not remember saying it. He did remember thinking it very, very hard. Hah. Reading my lines, Burakh? Dankovsky chuckled to himself, and Burakh raised a bleary eyebrow. 

“It did piss me off when they asked. But I prefer you to them, vastly so.”

The Bachelor began slipping the full vials in his bag, pushing them close together so they wouldn’t have room to move around. 

“Besides, you are not asking.”

Dankovsky walked to the door. Burakh jumped on his heels and was after him. 

“You’re staying here, right?” Dankovsky covertly ordered, eyebrows furrowed. 
“I am. I just thought you forgot something.”

Daniil gave him a little peck on the lips. Artemy went broshch-red. As he trotted out, more life in his stride than he’d had for days, lungs filled with a sense of purposefulness he thought illness and grief had bled out of him, Dankovsky walked past Sticky, who had dutifully stayed outside. 
Dankovsky sure damn hoped the kid hadn’t seen that, and if he had he better keep it to himself, and if he didn’t keep it to himself he better share only with kids who didn’t mind, and if the kids minded it better be in a good way, and they didn’t mind in a good way they’d have to go take it up with scary Burakh himself, because he started it. 
The Bachelor entered the theatre from stage left, where it is bad luck to exit out of.   

.❊.

     It was evening. Came the train. 
Came it black ox, cast iron burden beast that huffed, heaved, that breathed in hacks and whistles. The victors’ procession, coming back from a faraway war that left it drenched in a blood black and slick, covering it with a subtle sheen. Hearing it come to a crawl, then a stop with a loud blow, Dankovsky’s heart was grasped with a nostalgia for his first apartment, after he had finally made it out of students’ communal living, which towered over a train station, peeking at it of a small oculus like a curious eye. 
The army had gathered by the tracks to go home, or go back to whichever war they still had to wage, which was home too. Never had Dankovsky felt as much like an army-man. His father could’ve been proud.
Burakh had come. Looked dog-tired. Looked resigned, having shouldered the duty of seeing that black beast off to westbound. Sticky and Murky kept away.  
Then, something in the back of Dankovsky’s mind itched. 

“You came here by this train, didn’t you?” he asked, turning to Burakh.
“I did.”

Then how…? Dankovsky’s had been stopped, out there on the plains, and even if there were multiple stations in the city, this far out east they were travelling on the same rails. Had Burakh gotten on a train before him, with his later arrival in mind, Dankovsky would have seen his ride on his way there. Had he gotten on one after him, how in fates’ names did the “fucked” (sic) rails that stopped Dankovsky’s travel be so quickly repaired? 
So it must have been, then; same way that in one, tragic story, Helen was on the ramparts of Illion, in another equally, if not more through her absence, she wasn’t. And both at once were true, for men had died, and isle was named after her. Dankovsky shook his head and sourly smiled. He’d walked the line, then, the printed one, upon which story is written, tightrope-walked it, bending his head under the words resting on it. Such go the stories.

“What’s so funny?” Burakh asked without animosity. 
“Nothing. I was just… Thinking about Helen.”
“Who?”
“The Spartan queen.” He watched as Burakh’s eyes squinted in internal search. “‘Who launched a thousand ships’, you know…”
“Oh… right. I haven’t read the Iliad in a while.”
“I should re-read myself.”
“… Should I?” Burakh asked. “So we can bond over it? Have philological discussions instead of sex?” he whistled with a smirk.
“Oh, if you don’t quiet—” (Dankovsky had been way louder than Burakh had been, and brought more attention to them than he had.) “Give us more credit, we can do both at once!”

They snickered like adolescents. 

“No need, if you don’t feel like it.” Dankovsky tempered him. After some thought, he asked: “Say, hand me a book of your folktales.”
“Of our… oh, we’re more of an ‘oral tradition’ people,” Burakh scratched his jaw in thought. “But… Hold on.”
“I stay here until the train goes.”
“I’ll be back before it leaves.”

And, limping on his bad leg, Burakh ran off, into the town, Dankovsky watched him throw himself headlong into his quest. 
The train trembled. Dankovsky watched it shake itself off, impatient animal, and members of the crowd gestured to others to board quickly. Dankovsky felt his face grow cold, and a stirring panic bubbled up. It can’t end that way — he thought, without at least a goodbye, some heartfelt exodos! Without a tale to take home, something more tangible than sickness and the memory of sickness to hold! He was rushed aboard, but he lingered by the open door, which he held wide with all of his weight. Train shook again, whinnied or rumbled, its wheel-cranks shivered. Shit, shit, Burakh, hurry — how miserable would it be if time turned against them now, of all moments! and the train began pacing on. Dankovsky felt his heart sink. He considered jumping — considered staying, staying until the next train’s time came, but he’d overstayed his welcome already, he’d angered, he’d wounded, and he’d—he’d just spotted Burakh running like a mad dog, some sort of loosely-bound tome under the arm. 
Train was slow, train was sleepy, and Burakh caught up, he ran at its side. He could, because nestled between the spiral-striae of the story, there was mercy.

“Here!” he yelled, extending an arm that he couldn’t keep steady as he ran. Dankovsky extended his, as unsteady as he held himself precariously in the open car door, but grabbed onto the book nonetheless. “My—hfff—my dad had started a—hfff—collection of them. Helped him rememb—hfff—er them so he could read them tomeasachild—hack!”

He lowered his arm and slowed, and drifted away. He still walked by the train, but it was picking up speed. 

“Come give it back to me one day!” he shouted over the locomotive’s growl. 
“You’ll come and get it!” Dankovsky replied in kind.”
“I don’t even know your address!”
“You will!”

Train was not so slow anymore, and Dankovsky had to close the door. He hurried into the cart to open a window, and looked back. He looked back and Burakh was waving, and he waved back. He looked back and the town smelled of blood, bull’s and otherwise, and there was a hole in the shape of the Polyhedron in the sky, a so lovely verse lost to fire, without which the story made less sense, and he retched with grief, and he croaked out a sob, and Artemy was waving with two arms now, because he was so small in the distance, and Daniil waved back, and he blew a kiss because he was mad, and because it was the thing to do, and because he wanted to do it. 

     He exited stage right, yes, westbound, towards where the story began. In the same way there was no real war outside of Agamemnon’s stage, no unburied corpses outside of Antigone’s, there was no city, and there was no Thanatica. There was ether, to which the Bachelor came home into, into the interstices between particles of matter, where he lay flay, on a bed that was just his enough, flat and thin because hollowed, so he could fit between two lines of the story.    

.❊.

     ‘Twas not mothers who were missing from tragedies, was it? Oh, Medea, Hecuba, Clytemnestra, Leda, all mothers, to whom very little good ever happened, and from whom very little good ever came. Rare were those whose children came home from war alive, or if they hadn’t gone, rare were those children who left the play as living as they had entered it. 

How lucky was his mother, then, when he came back alive, he-child, he-loser, sourly so more than sorely so, who she had no intention of killing. 
He had knocked at his childhood home’s door like a mendicant, bent a knee as it felt too weak under him, like a supplicant. His mother, who he hadn’t killed in the ways Burakh, poor Burakh, had done his, had yelped, this so strong weeper, who didn’t weep, because he was not dead. 

[Exodos for a chorus of weepers.]

     When he was taken from the blood-soaked wood, pieces of his skin clinging to splinters, dotting them like snow dust — splinters clinging to his skin, sticking in like berrybush thorns — how did she feel? 
When she saw how his lungs had collapsed under the force of his pulled arms, how the ligaments of his shoulders and elbows had torn under his weight as he had hung, how the nails had dislodged the bones and ripped through the tendons of his white wrists to the middle of his palm, immovable, taunting, did it feel meaningful? His flank had bled like a gutted bull and a long red stripe snaked down his side, over his hip, followed his oblique to the inside of his thighs (she could relate); did it feel significant? 
When she finally was given his body (back, as it had come from her) and she got to hold it/him and it/he was all cold and skinny and so limp and so stiff, did it feel beautiful? 
Was there essence in this, in her arms? Was there substance? Was there importance? Or was there, all she felt, the sinking of her heart in her chest, through her stomach and entrails, falling out of her like chewed-and-puked food, and rotting on the ground, where her son’s feet rested?
When she did, as she was — if she was? — just a woman, just a mother, did it feel heavy? (Meaning one, meaning two.) 
You would have to ask her to know that. 
And Dankovsky, who was raised a believer but grew up not being one, never asked. 
And his mother, who was, did. 
Oh, many, many times. 

When he came home and he was pale and his cheeks were sunken (and he was holding his flank like he was nursing a side stitch), mother turned to mother and they talked about sons. 

She climbed the stairs and she put in the nightstand drawer the smallest Theotokos icon she owned — a yellowed, lacquered Eleusa, her favorite, who held the tiny infant, and shared with him a wide brown-eyed ribbon of stare — and for the first time in his adult life, Daniil, who had crawled into the bed that was once his and wept, didn’t ask for it to be put away. 

She went back downstairs. She washed in a basin her own feet, her aching ankles, then under the sink her hands and wrists too. She made bread and tea, and she waited. She ate a piece of the bread with honey and added some of it to the tea. 

Her own son needs no help crawling back to the earth. 
She hears his footsteps on the floorboards above and when she whispers “he is risen!” it only feels a little bit blasphemous. She hurries upstairs. 

[Exodos for a chorus of weepers.]

     Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.

Dankovsky was christened on a Thursday, actually. (It was an April-spring wet and cold, and his mother had had to cover his head with her shawl.)
That, and he never married.
Pain washed over him. Aching toes, ankles, all the prickles of pains on his side and flanks like arrowheads.

Crawled out of the grave on a Monday. 
He opened his eyes. 
Did that count as resurrection? His first thought was cynical and pricking — this closeness to the divine almost made him sick. Ah, still. Better a theomachist than suicidal. 
What was there to do? He had said he wanted to write something of this. 
This is how men like him lived — men who died, and who were reborn again. Through tales taller than themselves, through careful weaving, pricking holes for light, for the story to slither in. He needed to read Burakh’s folktales to give himself some heart, some lungs, give some to his writing. He sat by the window, because in his absence the electricity had been cut off — of course it would, damn you, like I don’t have anything more interesting to worry myself with —, and began reading.

[Exodos for a chorus of weepers, who do not weep, because the grave is empty.]

Sing thee Muse a beginning that is an end
And an end that is a beginning 
Blot thyself with endless knowing
But keep this: hollow of word, mend. 

Hollow you’ve seen, is what into which illness
Slithers: to lacunae you can give any tongue,
Without subject the word-well’s endless: 
From witch which speaks another, anything can be sung.

Reading between the lines — 
where the story develops —
Are you done with invocations, poured out like bitter wines?
Libations land nowhere, there is no grave, only blood-drops. 

Gone’s the warmth of story like is fall, comes winter and cold.
What is Styx, but a word that begins with this letter?
Serpent, story, sacrificial stone, not in this order, all huddle together
In a book bigger than this, hundred-and-some-fold. 

Dankovsky cannot leave, Dankovsky has not left, has left epithet
in the Town; which he knows so deeply: 
pages upon pages he could write. He does. Like some others one knows. 
He’s left himself open back there, somewhere, the scrying-well of haruspicy;
And upon godstone like on page he finds: he is not dead, not yet.