#duskbirds

[duskbirdscomic]

Duskbirds #28 | “Angel Island Dracaena” Originally Published: Thursday September 7th, 2023

I went on a hike to Angel Island recently. It was the first time I’ve been there. You take a ferry to the island, which makes it feel like a special little trip.

We took our time during the hike, which turned out to be very fun, because I didn’t know there would be additional sites to see other than general wilderness. There were plenty of those, as well, to be sure – such as this giant version of what, to me, resembled a huge specimen of the “Dracaena” plant we have in our kitchen!

I had no prior knowledge of this plant before, and because we had just started Pikmin 4 around this time, I could not help relating to the starting parts of the game. When your little alien astronaut friend exclaims, “The plants on this planet are huge!” While you, as the player, cannot help thinking how silly these aliens are – how they are unaware by how they are the tiny ones!

More rambling about the hike and plants in the full Duskbirds.com post! https://duskbirds.com/2023/09/12/angel-island-dracaena/

-- 🌙 Official Site: Duskbirds.com

🌙 Duskbirds on ComicFury

#duskbirds #duskbirds comic #pikmin #angel island #dracaena #Caribbean Agave #comic #comic strip

[landylachs]

Duskbirds #25: "Short-form Content"

I was editing a longer art process video and had it nearly finished, but knew it would take me probably about a week more to check everything over and refine before posting.

I haven't been a fan of the current push for short-form content, but because I had this footage 99% completed, I thought why not try out turning it into a short preview clip. This way I can show something in the meantime, while I finished the full video (and in case it ended up taking me longer to finish, which it has!).

(Edit: I finally figured out how to add a read more break, yay! I think they changed this from old Tumblr, because I could have sworn I've used this in older posts. I thought they removed it when they added this new editor, and have been wishing it was still here. Well, apparently it is, I just had to manually search how to do it. Incidentally, is this editor really buggy for anyone else. It doesn't let me undo or redo anything anymore. Okay, I think the read more feature might be dangerous for me, I'll stop rambling in this edit now, I'm sorry.)

While editing the preview clip, I was surprised by how unexpectedly fun editing a shorter version was. I've only edited longer clips before this. While I do enjoy editing, they are sort of involved for me (in terms of time/required focus). Working on a shorter preview version took a lot of the pressure off, and made it into a surprisingly light and fun experience.

I've made a few of these previews/shorter clips as an experiment recently, and while they are fun to make, I was also was rather amused by the real-time metrics YouTube provides.

I'm also not sure how interesting this might be because the comic style is fairly simple, but I couldn't resist doing a bit of editing for fun - and compiled the footage for this page into a simple process video here: View process video on YouTube

It is not a "how-to" video, though - if anything, it's more a chronicle of practices to avoid, as I was particularly inefficient with how I drew this page, haha. (If it isn't obvious, I mainly draw Duskbirds as stress-relief/low-stakes drawing for myself.)

===

🌱 Official Site: Duskbirds.com 🌱 Read on ComicFury

🌱 Links: LizLiu.com/links

===

#comics #webcomic #duskbirds #shorts #reels #landylachs

[neros-w]

i realize hyv may have been hinting at haypasia/tighnari somehow and yknow what i can See it sorta? idk if im biased in saying that tighnari's gege vibes is just off the charts though so i can see it going either way

#its the whole special emergency duskbird and personal shorthand #and the way tighnari is constantly concerned for her safety #and is genuinely touched when the traveler asks after her #i wish they bring haypasia back sometime soon though i miss her unhinged albedo-ness #her 'hm yes this needs further study *proceeds to run into danger*' energy

[apoemaday]

Summer Solstice

by Stacie Cassarino

I wanted to see where beauty comes from without you in the world, hauling my heart across sixty acres of northeast meadow, my pockets filling with flowers. Then I remembered, it’s you I miss in the brightness and body of every living name: rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch. You are the green wonder of June, root and quasar, the thirst for salt. When I finally understand that people fail at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle, the paper wings of the dragonfly aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity? If I get the story right, desire is continuous, equatorial. There is still so much I want to know: what you believe can never be removed from us, what you dreamed on Walnut Street in the unanswerable dark of your childhood, learning pleasure on your own. Tell me our story: are we impetuous, are we kind to each other, do we surrender to what the mind cannot think past? Where is the evidence I will learn to be good at loving? The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies. There are violet hills, there is the covenant of duskbirds. The moon comes over the mountain like a big peach, and I want to tell you what I couldn’t say the night we rushed North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers and the way you go into yourself, calling my half-name like a secret. I stand between taproot and treespire. Here is the compass rose to help me live through this. Here are twelve ways of knowing what blooms even in the blindness of such longing. Yellow oxeye, viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms pleading do not forget me. We hunger for eloquence. We measure the isopleths. I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude. The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries. Fireflies turn on their electric wills: an effulgence. Let me come back whole, let me remember how to touch you before it is too late.

#poetry #stacie cassarino #summer solstice

[finalgirlfall]

reposting the text of an ask answered by elucipher in 2014 for archival purposes

archive link to the original post, which included a read-more break

maynads asked: Your posts on Helen are absolutely amazing and so informative!! On that note - could you share your views on Cassandra of Troy?

elucipher answered:

Apollo, Apollo! Leader of journeys, my destroyer!

All this way you have led me, to destroy me again?

— Cassandra, Agamemnon.

i. This story is not kind.

ix. The queen Clytemnestra stands before the doors of Argos' tall royal slaughterhouse. Her hands stink red.

Cassandra stumbles forward, to that woman who is false honey and full-nerved hate, and an image of her death rears up before her: smile of axe-edge, crack and blood-bloom. There is no swerving from it—the sight unstoppers her throat and she retches gouts of prophecy, and knows she is not heard.

The killing queen calls her in. To the east the sky is on fire, and fate is the silver tremor of her heart.

ii. In her seventh year, the king and queen take their godstruck daughter to the sanctuary of Thymbraean Apollo. At dawn she is found sleeping in the coils of snakes, her ears licked clean to hear the voice of the god.

iii. No woman was ever so young a priestess. She kneels at prayer in his temple, O Apollo Apollo, and the god climbs down from the sky. He is glory; he draws her face up with hot hands.

He says, I will give you fate's far-seeing eyes.

Yes, she says, rising. Yes.

She is sun-struck, brimming with radical light that pours down her backbone and through all the deep of her. But when the bright god presses his body to her and his fingers scorch at the hollow of her throat, she drives him back. Then darkly he draws himself up, prideful and savage, and he spits in her mouth.

Treacherous woman. A hissing like wildfire. Yours will be a lunatic tongue.

Cassandra runs, across the plain that will swell with nameless graves. For a moment she sees flames as tall as sails, feeding on the walls of Troy.

iv. She dreams of white ships on the horizon’s knife. A girl gowned for a wedding is hoisted up for slaughter. Soldiers clash in octaves of havoc. Sun-sucked streets run black with gore.

She tells of this ruin but no one heeds her. She rages--why are you not afraid—and begs her family to listen, but they hear only shriller delirium. She shouts in the streets and the people whisper fool, fanatic; they call her mad and devil-stolen.

When she will not be consoled she is shut in a house like a tomb. Apollo has made her a monster, an exile of the grey place that is called to apeiron--the unbounded, the place of wolves.

v. Her brother Paris comes to her bedchamber where she weaves. Bound for Achaea, he is fair and strong in light-licked armour, and calamity lies like a shadow on his shoulders. He stoops to kiss her brow. There is a knife hidden in her sleeve, but she cannot bear to cut that fateful horizon into his throat.

His ship sets sail. Cassandra dreams of a horse with a bellyful of iron maggots, and her brother’s eyes when he is dead.

From her window she hears the covenants of duskbirds, the golden city in soft repose. It all burns.

vi. She warned until her voice gave way. She took axe and torch and set upon the great horse, to kill what lurked there. The king’s men prisoned her in the dark with Apollo’s laughter and the city was slaughtered as it slept.

In the years of siege she saw augury's shadows come again as sound and flesh: Andromache, dull-staring, dragged away by her hair; Hector, faceless, his funeral shroud dust and clotted blood; Paris, so fair, with an arrow through his throat; her father, slumped over a shattered altar; her mother, a slave for Odysseus; her youngest sister, bled like an animal on the grave of Achilles.

Now she goes foot by foot through the streets of ash and fume and sword-shriek, treading over carcasses.

The conquerors find her, and she will not be silent. A foreign soldier, death-drunk, sprawls her on the floor of Athena's temple and lurches over her, and she roars out his fate—for this, the goddess will swell a storm and crack his ship and his bones on the rocks of Euboea.

Her body is hefted away by soldiers. At the brink of her hearing—thunder.

vii.

Agamemnon, king, keeps her chained in his tent as he gloats over the spoils of felled and gutted Troy. He calls for prophecy and laughs at her raving.

She sees pyres of bodies unseamed by swords, Dardanian captives crying in and out of speech. The sky is deaf to prayers—it sends only carrion birds, who bear no missives and squabble among the butchered. She is a witness, hollowed but for her rage.

The king lies beside her in glutted beast-sleep and she whispers his death: the queen with red hands, the lioness crouched in long shadows.

vii. The king's longships set sail. She leans over the edge, with her loosed hair and her mouth salt-limned, and watches the billowing and glister of waves, the shadows beneath mosaic light.

Her belly is swollen. She knows them, her sons: crooked laugh; steady and devoted hands. She gives birth to them on the deck, the sun sweltering on her body. With every agony she curses Apollo.

Later, under mute stars, her children lie stirring in the vigil of her arms and she sings to them of a city no longer alive. They do not hear madness, only the soft and breaking swell of her voice.

When the ship lands on Argos, the children are torn from her. She thought herself iron-proofed against pain, but the sounds from her throat are not human.

Agamemnon hails his queen, and in her smile there is the shadow of her smile, the bladed gleam Cassandra dreamt. In her hands there is death.

x. Cassandra wakes in the dim place at the rim of the earth. Around her thronging dead glimmer up, their mouths ajar. They are gentle.

Apollo trespasses there, too bright to bear. He kneels before her. He is violent glory and his eyes shine, void.

I loved you ever, he says.

She is yet his prophet: in an awful voice she tells him of the mortals he will love till they are burned inside-out, and his deathless grief. Shaken, he leads her out of that dark.

The sun, slanted in hazy carnival, laps at the hem of her dress. Her god offers her the sky but she does not heed him—she has already turned away.

He lets her go, a wolf beyond light’s coveting hands.

Cassandra walks in the ungolden ruins of Troy, and sings of the world to come.

#words #Κασσάνδρα #the screen separating the soul from you

[hepatosaurus]

national poetry month, day 25

Summer Solstice I wanted to see where beauty comes from without you in the world, hauling my heart across sixty acres of northeast meadow, my pockets filling with flowers. Then I remembered, it’s you I miss in the brightness and body of every living name: rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch. You are the green wonder of June, root and quasar, the thirst for salt. When I finally understand that people fail at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle, the paper wings of the dragonfly aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity? If I get the story right, desire is continuous, equatorial. There is still so much I want to know: what you believe can never be removed from us, what you dreamed on Walnut Street in the unanswerable dark of your childhood, learning pleasure on your own. Tell me our story: are we impetuous, are we kind to each other, do we surrender to what the mind cannot think past? Where is the evidence I will learn to be good at loving? The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies. There are violet hills, there is the covenant of duskbirds. The moon comes over the mountain like a big peach, and I want to tell you what I couldn’t say the night we rushed North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers and the way you go into yourself, calling my half-name like a secret. I stand between taproot and treespire. Here is the compass rose to help me live through this. Here are twelve ways of knowing what blooms even in the blindness of such longing. Yellow oxeye, viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms pleading do not forget me. We hunger for eloquence. We measure the isopleths. I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude. The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries. Fireflies turn on their electric wills: an effulgence. Let me come back whole, let me remember how to touch you before it is too late. —Stacie Cassarino

#stacie cassarino #summer solstice #poetry #national poetry month #npm2023

[shawnparell]

The Summer Solstice

I wanted to see where beauty comes from

without you in the world, hauling my heart

across sixty acres of northeast meadow,

my pockets filling with flowers.

Then I remembered,

it’s you I miss in the brightness

and body of every living name:

rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.

You are the green wonder of June,

root and quasar, the thirst for salt.

When I finally understand that people fail

at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,

the paper wings of the dragonfly

aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?

If I get the story right, desire is continuous,

equatorial. There is still so much

I want to know: what you believe

can never be removed from us,

what you dreamed on Walnut Street

in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,

learning pleasure on your own.

Tell me our story: are we impetuous,

are we kind to each other, do we surrender

to what the mind cannot think past?

Where is the evidence I will learn

to be good at loving?

The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond

for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.

There are violet hills,

there is the covenant of duskbirds.

The moon comes over the mountain

like a big peach, and I want to tell you

what I couldn’t say the night we rushed

North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers

and the way you go into yourself,

calling my half-name like a secret.

I stand between taproot and treespire.

Here is the compass rose

to help me live through this.

Here are twelve ways of knowing

what blooms even in the blindness

of such longing. Yellow oxeye,

viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms

pleading do not forget me.

We hunger for eloquence.

We measure the isopleths.

I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.

The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.

Fireflies turn on their electric wills:

an effulgence. Let me come back

whole, let me remember how to touch you

before it is too late.

#poetry #mystical poetry #yogapoetica #staciecassarino

[thedancemostofall]

Summer Solstice

BY STACIE CASSARINO

I wanted to see where beauty comes from without you in the world, hauling my heart across sixty acres of northeast meadow, my pockets filling with flowers. Then I remembered, it’s you I miss in the brightness and body of every living name: rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch. You are the green wonder of June, root and quasar, the thirst for salt. When I finally understand that people fail at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle, the paper wings of the dragonfly aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity? If I get the story right, desire is continuous, equatorial. There is still so much I want to know: what you believe can never be removed from us, what you dreamed on Walnut Street in the unanswerable dark of your childhood, learning pleasure on your own. Tell me our story: are we impetuous, are we kind to each other, do we surrender to what the mind cannot think past? Where is the evidence I will learn to be good at loving? The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies. There are violet hills, there is the covenant of duskbirds. The moon comes over the mountain like a big peach, and I want to tell you what I couldn’t say the night we rushed North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers and the way you go into yourself, calling my half-name like a secret. I stand between taproot and treespire. Here is the compass rose to help me live through this. Here are twelve ways of knowing what blooms even in the blindness of such longing. Yellow oxeye, viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms pleading do not forget me. We hunger for eloquence. We measure the isopleths. I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude. The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries. Fireflies turn on their electric wills: an effulgence. Let me come back whole, let me remember how to touch you before it is too late.

[violettesiren]

I wanted to see where beauty comes from without you in the world, hauling my heart across sixty acres of northeast meadow, my pockets filling with flowers. Then I remembered, it’s you I miss in the brightness and body of every living name: rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch. You are the green wonder of June, root and quasar, the thirst for salt. When I finally understand that people fail at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle, the paper wings of the dragonfly aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity? If I get the story right, desire is continuous, equatorial. There is still so much I want to know: what you believe can never be removed from us, what you dreamed on Walnut Street in the unanswerable dark of your childhood, learning pleasure on your own. Tell me our story: are we impetuous, are we kind to each other, do we surrender to what the mind cannot think past? Where is the evidence I will learn to be good at loving? The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies. There are violet hills, there is the covenant of duskbirds. The moon comes over the mountain like a big peach, and I want to tell you what I couldn’t say the night we rushed North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers and the way you go into yourself, calling my half-name like a secret. I stand between taproot and treespire. Here is the compass rose to help me live through this. Here are twelve ways of knowing what blooms even in the blindness of such longing. Yellow oxeye, viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms pleading do not forget me. We hunger for eloquence. We measure the isopleths. I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude. The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries. Fireflies turn on their electric wills: an effulgence. Let me come back whole, let me remember how to touch you before it is too late.

Summer Solstice by Stacie Cassarino

#stacie cassarino

[duskbirdscomic]

Duskbirds #15 | “Communication” Originally Published: Monday May 15th, 2023

This is inspired by the general sentiment of the era we’re currently living in.

This is also the first Duskbirds comic where I switched over to the current font! (“Cartoonist’s Hand” by Shyfont)

More random thoughts in the full post for this page on the Duskbirds.com’s official site!

-- 🌙 Official Site: Duskbirds.com

🌙 Duskbirds on ComicFury

#duskbirds #duskbirds comic #comic #comic strip #communication

[landylachs]

Paintober Days 7-9 “Respite,” “Spiral,” and “Tiny Duskbirds”

A few Paintober paintings from this week!

Today’s painting on Twitter! 

====

🌱WEBSITE: LizLiu.com 🌱 Sketchblog 🌱 Twitter

🌱LINKS: LizLiu.com/links

====

#paintober #environment art #environment sketches #anthro #anthro art #anthro avian #anthro bird #forest #forest art #duskbirds #duskbird #landylachs #original art #original character

[sorrelstream]

hmm speakin of the tribe im thinkin abt how they r in my rewrite... i already decided theyre actually a Distant Clan known as JaggedClan (after the mountains hehe) so i can kinda explore the concept of distant clans and how they developed differently than the 4 traditional/original clan (since bloodclan and skyclan are also two distant clans that existed/currently exist)

like for example. although the ranks are pretty much the same as the main 4, they have differences in culture/tradition. jaggedclan doesnt have a set naming system since they dont really live with any big neighbors - because they dont have to make set suffixes to represent the cat, jaggedclan focuses more on lyrical names (like Brookfish, Stoneteller, Talonswoop, Duskbird, Graydawn, etc.). caretakers would still be a thing but they have more of the canon cave-guard role - they not only care for the kits but guard the cave/home while the warriors go out and do patrols, hunting, missions, etc.

theres still a leader, deputy, and med cat/seer role and they commune with starclan in the same spot that stoneteller in canon communes with the tribe of endless hunting. just some thots

#i be thinkin whats up #rewrite #rewrite au

[kinard-buckley]

National Poetry Month: Day 26

Summer Solstice | Stacie Cassarino I wanted to see where beauty comes from without you in the world, hauling my heart across sixty acres of northeast meadow, my pockets filling with flowers. Then I remembered, it’s you I miss in the brightness and body of every living name: rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch. You are the green wonder of June, root and quasar, the thirst for salt. When I finally understand that people fail at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle, the paper wings of the dragonfly aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity? If I get the story right, desire is continuous, equatorial. There is still so much I want to know: what you believe can never be removed from us, what you dreamed on Walnut Street in the unanswerable dark of your childhood, learning pleasure on your own. Tell me our story: are we impetuous, are we kind to each other, do we surrender to what the mind cannot think past? Where is the evidence I will learn to be good at loving? The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies. There are violet hills, there is the covenant of duskbirds. The moon comes over the mountain like a big peach, and I want to tell you what I couldn’t say the night we rushed North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers and the way you go into yourself, calling my half-name like a secret. I stand between taproot and treespire. Here is the compass rose to help me live through this. Here are twelve ways of knowing what blooms even in the blindness of such longing. Yellow oxeye, viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms pleading do not forget me. We hunger for eloquence. We measure the isopleths. I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude. The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries. Fireflies turn on their electric wills: an effulgence. Let me come back whole, let me remember how to touch you before it is too late.

#poetry #national poetry month #national poetry month 2020 #text #exQUEUEse me

[ragewrites]

evening lowers into the hill, into the unmade bed of its’ morass — stretches long limbs with a yawn, allows dark hair to come unbound, resembling a woman risen or fallen newly into Love’s fevering arms. in its’ klin, the passionloaf of our marriage exhales slow in tacit accomplicity, bearing the copper tones of sunburnt apple, of the freckles burnished across my bare shoulders — darkling, night is now more than mere promise. red wine joins red onion: the pan is as alive as the household, whis'ling with old song; all is as God intended, down to the hole moth- gnawed in my left sleeve. I scarcely feel the prick of wind; your love warmclothes me, an embrace of the sinews, of the small bones. you’re nested in my cochlea, a rare, obscure duskbird. o — hum for me, beloved. hum whilst the slow stew cooks.

  mealmaking   july 17th, 2019  / /  lianna schreiber

#spilled ink #writers on tumblr #poets on tumblr #poetry #poem #free verse #freeverse #freeform #free form #inkstain #quotidie #2019

[fluttering-slips]

Summer Solstice  I wanted to see where beauty comes from without you in the world, hauling my heart across sixty acres of northeast meadow, my pockets filling with flowers. Then I remembered, it’s you I miss in the brightness and body of every living name: rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch. You are the green wonder of June, root and quasar, the thirst for salt. When I finally understand that people fail at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle, the paper wings of the dragonfly aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity? If I get the story right, desire is continuous, equatorial. There is still so much I want to know: what you believe can never be removed from us, what you dreamed on Walnut Street in the unanswerable dark of your childhood, learning pleasure on your own. Tell me our story: are we impetuous, are we kind to each other, do we surrender to what the mind cannot think past? Where is the evidence I will learn to be good at loving? The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies. There are violet hills, there is the covenant of duskbirds. The moon comes over the mountain like a big peach, and I want to tell you what I couldn’t say the night we rushed North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers and the way you go into yourself, calling my half-name like a secret. I stand between taproot and treespire. Here is the compass rose to help me live through this. Here are twelve ways of knowing what blooms even in the blindness of such longing. Yellow oxeye, viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms pleading do not forget me. We hunger for eloquence. We measure the isopleths. I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude. The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries. Fireflies turn on their electric wills: an effulgence. Let me come back whole, let me remember how to touch you before it is too late.

Stacie Cassarino

#Summer Solstice #Stacie Cassarino #poetry

[almoststardust]

maynads asked: Your posts on Helen are absolutely amazing and so informative!! On that note - could you share your views on Cassandra of Troy?

elucipher:

Apollo, Apollo! Leader of journeys, my destroyer! All this way you have led me, to destroy me again?

— Cassandra, Agamemnon.

i.

This story is not kind.

ix.

The queen Clytemnestra stands before the doors of Argos’ tall royal slaughterhouse. Her hands stink red.

Cassandra stumbles forward, to that woman who is false honey and full-nerved hate, and an image of her death rears up before her: smile of axe-edge, crack and blood-bloom. There is no swerving from it—the sight unstoppers her throat and she retches gouts of prophecy, and knows she is not heard.

The killing queen calls her in. To the east the sky is on fire, and fate is the silver tremor of her heart.

ii.

In her seventh year, the king and queen take their godstruck daughter to the sanctuary of Thymbraean Apollo. At dawn she is found sleeping in the coils of snakes, her ears licked clean to hear the voice of the god.

iii.

No woman was ever so young a priestess. She kneels at prayer in his temple, O Apollo Apollo, and the god climbs down from the sky. He is glory; he draws her face up with hot hands.

He says, I will give you fate’s far-seeing eyes.

Yes, she says, rising. Yes.

She is sun-struck, brimming with radical light that pours down her backbone and through all the deep of her. But when the bright god presses his body to her and his fingers scorch at the hollow of her throat, she drives him back. Then darkly he draws himself up, prideful and savage, and he spits in her mouth.

Treacherous woman. A hissing like wildfire. Yours will be a lunatic tongue.

Cassandra runs, across the plain that will swell with nameless graves. For a moment she sees flames as tall as sails, feeding on the walls of Troy.

iv.

She dreams of white ships on the horizon’s knife. A girl gowned for a wedding is hoisted up for slaughter. Soldiers clash in octaves of havoc. Sun-sucked streets run black with gore.

She tells of this ruin but no one heeds her. She rages—why are you not afraid—and begs her family to listen, but they hear only shriller delirium. She shouts in the streets and the people whisper fool, fanatic; they call her mad and devil-stolen.

When she will not be consoled she is shut in a house like a tomb. Apollo has made her a monster, an exile of the grey place that is called to apeiron—the unbounded, the place of wolves.

v.

Her brother Paris comes to her bedchamber where she weaves. Bound for Achaea, he is fair and strong in light-licked armour, and calamity lies like a shadow on his shoulders. He stoops to kiss her brow. There is a knife hidden in her sleeve, but she cannot bear to cut that fateful horizon into his throat.

His ship sets sail. Cassandra dreams of a horse with a bellyful of iron maggots, and her brother’s eyes when he is dead.

From her window she hears the covenants of duskbirds, the golden city in soft repose. It all burns.

vi.

She warned until her voice gave way. She took axe and torch and set upon the great horse, to kill what lurked there. The king’s men prisoned her in the dark with Apollo’s laughter and the city was slaughtered as it slept.  

In the years of siege she saw augury’s shadows come again as sound and flesh: Andromache, dull-staring, dragged away by her hair; Hector, faceless, his funeral shroud dust and clotted blood; Paris, so fair, with an arrow through his throat; her father, slumped over a shattered altar; her mother, a slave for Odysseus; her youngest sister, bled like an animal on the grave of Achilles.

Now she goes foot by foot through the streets of ash and fume and sword-shriek, treading over carcasses.

The conquerors find her, and she will not be silent. A foreign soldier, death-drunk, sprawls her on the floor of Athena’s temple and lurches over her, and she roars out his fate—for this, the goddess will swell a storm and crack his ship and his bones on the rocks of Euboea.

Her body is hefted away by soldiers. At the brink of her hearing—thunder.

vii.

Agamemnon, king, keeps her chained in his tent as he gloats over the spoils of felled and gutted Troy. He calls for prophecy and laughs at her raving.

She sees pyres of bodies unseamed by swords, Dardanian captives crying in and out of speech. The sky is deaf to prayers—it sends only carrion birds, who bear no missives and squabble among the butchered. She is a witness, hollowed but for her rage.

The king lies beside her in glutted beast-sleep and she whispers his death: the queen with red hands, the lioness crouched in long shadows.

viii.

The king’s longships set sail. She leans over the edge, with her loosed hair and her mouth salt-limned, and watches the billowing and glister of waves, the shadows beneath mosaic light.

Her belly is swollen. She knows them, her sons: crooked laugh; steady and devoted hands. She gives birth to them on the deck, the sun sweltering on her body. With every agony she curses Apollo.

Later, under mute stars, her children lie stirring in the vigil of her arms and she sings to them of a city no longer alive. They do not hear madness, only the soft and breaking swell of her voice.

When the ship lands on Argos, the children are torn from her. She thought herself iron-proofed against pain, but the sounds from her throat are not human.

Agamemnon hails his queen, and in her smile there is the shadow of her smile, the bladed gleam Cassandra dreamt. In her hands there is death.

x.

Cassandra wakes in the dim place at the rim of the earth. Around her thronging dead glimmer up, their mouths ajar. They are gentle.

Apollo trespasses there, too bright to bear. He kneels before her. He is violent glory and his eyes shine, void.

I loved you ever, he says.

She is yet his prophet: in an awful voice she tells him of the mortals he will love till they are burned inside-out, and his deathless grief. Shaken, he leads her out of that dark.

The sun, slanted in hazy carnival, laps at the hem of her dress. Her god offers her the sky but she does not heed him—she has already turned away.

He lets her go, a wolf beyond light’s coveting hands.

Cassandra walks in the ungolden ruins of Troy, and sings of the world to come.

#maynads #mythology #cassandra of troy #(yes that numbering is deliberate) #there are figures in greek mythology i love #and then there's cassandra #whose story is more important to me than any other #and yet it's always shrunk to a footnote in other stories easier to swallow #i'm writing this on a train and now i have to get off the train #when i get home i'll probably despair of how rough and weird this is #this is a war story it's brutal in parts #rape tw #gore tw #emetophobia tw #things i wrote #and set my teeth in the silver of the moon

#mythology #cassandra of troy #elucipher