Iron-Rich

The music grew. It was a living thing, twisting and writhing, swelling, contracting, and swelling again.

When Mira glanced back to the clockwork toy, its key had stopped turning. The ivory swan was stagnant, unmoving, but the music continued, and in the crescendo Mira felt the velvety brush of fast blooming flowers on her skin, the heat of fevered skin, the kiss of a steel blade.

In the dim light the swan’s eyes, wine red, flickered. Mira stared at them as the garden, the light, the sky and the ground blurred together. The swan’s eyes were darker, murkier, red, red, red as blood, blood, blood…

Mira opened her mouth, the call for Valentine, but her breath was sucked away into some void and she staggered without it as the world pin wheeled in a gold and scarlet fury.

Mira dreamed, and what she dreamed was:

A mirage of gold swirls, parting before a mirror, and in it, her own reflection, but her eyes were black as night…

Someone was opening their wrist, splitting the sun-bronzed skin as though it were only stitched together, and blood rose and feel from it, iron-rich, and grey and metallic, then it burst with light, like liquid gold…

Green-tinted landscapes, as though the sun was eclipsed by an emerald. Then the streets flashed, and Mira blinked and the green was contained into coal-lined eyes…

Mira lay on a pile of plush cushions, languid, surrounded by candles and brassy music, like some ridiculous exequies being performed. But she was not dying, no, she was changing. Black feathers stuck to her arms. Metamorphesis, she thought, as she sunk deeper and deeper into the cushions that swayed and tossed her like a crimson sea…

Mira surfaced from the darkness like a leaf floating to the surface of a river, weak and tremulous.

The current of the river pushes her to consciousness and the realization that the green-eyed musician stood over her, watches as she blinked awaked. His gaze met hers and discarded all vestiges of sleep from her body.

“What happened?” she asked, when she noticed Valentine also stood over her, like a sentinel in black and gold.

Art by Fatima Batool 

Text by Lucie MacAulay