Though many seem to be with a mind quick to sort, an inherent, subconscious practice built over lifetimes, they aren’t chronological – his dreams. Time, as it does in such magical places, ebbs and flows, finds paths through rivers with cracks in the banks that, over time, erode sands and gouge paths in the earth as wide and as deep as canyons. Where one thought – one memory – may be, there are a dozen or more outshoots, tangents, threads to follow towards far off points which joint back into the torrent of current memory, building elaborate webs of misshapen understanding.
Sometimes, it is lucid, the languished form draped over the blood red brocade of chairs or the press of bare feet against gilded floors, each small snap of cold from the breath of the Chernosyvat met with sun warm counterbalance that could be as radiant as the sun in such a sometimes dim, dark place. Sometimes, it is vivid, the hot flash of fire and sweat of delirium that the nameless speaks nothing to, breath held in stringent anticipation of unorthodox sacrament. Sometimes, it is detailed, highly colored, these moments swathed in dark gray and silver and others, they are wisps, nothing but smoke and nothing but shadows that even the open rays of the balmy sun cannot cut through; but like the twist of antlers mounted on weather-bleached bones, they twist, stretch, and hook towards the sun – when there is one.
He has to admit he doesn’t recognize this place – he knows it as home, this Black Kremlin that breaths life at every turn, walls creaking, fires burning like the very heart of buildings with no eyes, no teeth, no means of expression or conversation beyond what one can feel; but the windows are dim as if the very stars in the sky, twinkling with their far off deaths in the cosmos, have refused to acknowledge the life once had, and the shops and the houses, the homes of those with still some magic left in the bones, in their blood, still and silent even as he walks the darkened path of icy streets. They’re still there, those which resident within, but from them breathe wisps of silver and cold and dust sits where food may have once been.
He knows not to look despite his compulsion to peer into the faces of the dead so readily gobbled up by the Tsar of Death, welcomed with arms wide open into lies of a return to the warmth and comfort of life – a warmth and comfort he knows, even if not recognized, in every life to come; and every so often, every few years, every few hundred, every sword through the stomach and every death faced, he steps into this place of dust and ash and remnants of what had been only to serve as an example of such ill-laid promises.
It is a constant – the back and forth of life and death – and the pale, pallid faces of those across such defined enemy lines blend together over lifetimes as their voices, some nearly whispers on the wind, still roil in their pleas, the faces of those across such ever-changing lines blending together over lifetimes. They are the soldiers brought down by Viy and his armies, quick to enlistment on the opposing side. They are those lost to poverty, to disease and to famine, which have little to no choice as countries swell into war. They are the devout followers, the singed, the burnt and ashen believers of something once greater than God and the duped, the conned, the used remnants of days past when it paid to be worse than the enemies made.
And they reach for him as they reach for the sun, this being who crosses the war-torn lines between life and death, and all he wants to do is reach such darkened doors of the garnet-drenched towers and high vestibules of the Chernosyvat where he knows, behind them, sits a man on a throne of bone and onyx as he pours over an ever-scattering map of war plans, of strategy, against an enemy that can never be beat; where he knows, behind them, the pangs of silver lines to his heart, the pathways to deaths endured over lifetimes, can be snipped; where he knows, behind them, he can live and live some more until his time is up and once more, if only for a day, if only for a year, Viy has a firebird, biting and snapping and clawing with the bones of once-ornate talons until he returns.
Except what he walks into once he pushes open the grand aperture isn’t the expanse of welcomed shadows, of fireplaces alight and grand staircases spinning towards rooms of red, of kitchens breathing hot and aromatically with everything from freshly baked bread to newly churned, salted butter and the richness of hearty stews. It isn’t the welcomed cold felt on the warmest of summers or the exhale of heat to come with the shrillest of winters, and there is no man on a throne, youthful or old or somewhere in between.
It is cold. It is dark. It is gray and dirty silver, everything reflecting such silvery white – from the edges of Art Deco furnishings of the hotel room and photos with nameless faces that blur and bleed into the echoing dissonance of untold points in time to the bodies within – the waxing and the waning, the living and the dead and the soon-to-be; and he feels it, the moment it seems the tether has found him again, in a prick of something small, like a needle, which doesn’t hurt but for a moment, but threatens to draw him in, closer and closer.
“It’s not so bad, солнцевич – being dead,” he seems to say though he feels no movement of his lips, no timbre of his voice in his head, as if listening to a ghost on the other side of battle lines that, like the slow seep of a yolk, spreads silvery cold against his chest. It is a star, silver, burning out bright light that drips onto his fingers like blood from untold wounds. It marks the moment to come, the year between one death and another birth, and he can feel the weight of almost gleeful turpitude on his shoulders that pushes, sinks him into the ground as if nothing but quicksand hasted by the pull of dead hands.
And when he reaches the other side, when it feels there should be some suspension to the thick, murky black he has been dragged into, he is falling – hard and fast – towards the unknown, every crack in his skin, every feather trailing upward into the starless night of the abyss like escaping breath, only bears ghostly wisps of silver and trails of ash, nothing to be of fire and gold and prismatic wings to hoist him towards the sun.
There is no immolation in this death – not at first – and he is afraid to hit the ground if there is ground to be found. Would he shatter into bone and ash, remnants of what had been? Or would he explode, a fiery rage that scatters until he is found again, scooped up into the hands of safety? Would he forget in such a sudden pop of subconsciousness?
He doesn’t know, but he closes his eyes as he waits for the impact. Tight and tighter still and - Wham!
“Ебать!” It is nothing more than a jerk, a kick in the night that shoots him upright in shock, and all but throws his legs over the side of the bed to stand himself up on his own two feet; to pad across the quiet room to look in the mirror where his appearance is as it has ever been in this life; to shuffle bare feet into the kitchen, one he hopes to not live in much longer, where he splashes water on his face and settles into the silence of an apartment that doesn’t breathe – not like Buyan, not like its houses and its shops and its looming towers of black and garnet - rather stands sentry, no hair eaves or hide walls or magic to it beyond those who live within.
It feels skeletal, this contemporary cage of industrial bone and long-laid pipes and fluorescent lights in a minimalist space only growing more so as boxes are packed, gutted like an animal to remain vacant until another soul moves in, and though he realizes it is the fringe terrors of the mind making the silence so loud, Ash still presses his mind to try and calm it – to calm himself.