Cut in half, the sun is delving into the ocean when I wake. Red light, dark blue water, my eyes think the scene should mix black, or muddy, not dazzle as light on water.

Fumbling around me, I dig out the bandages and a water bottle from the backpack, pull off the cap but there's no water, I dig out another bottle and gulp liquid until bitterness dilutes off my tongue. My fingers slide the clay container back, but it clinks, making a jet bird by my boots twitch. My hand freezes. She goes still. I extract my arm from the pack, slowly roll out my aching neck.

I tug the cloak off, and the shirt, to re-apply bandages. An ocean wind tickles my hot skin. I tear off the old bandages, wince, bundle them up in my fist. I may not need new bandages. If I were to lie here for another day. Yet, we have to walk to a town, and find a crystalline-blooding child, hoping the stone mage sleeps this night, and the scabs could easily reopen.

The skritching of the bandage roll, half used, wakes the jet bird for real. She hops to her feet, tilts her head at me. Flaps her wings and I stare back, patting bandages into place. She flutters to the waves, takes a tiny hop, and plunges underwater. I shake my head and stick bandages to my back. Facedown, she paddles her wings, mostly just splashing. Bobbing back upright, she kicks with narrow talons and ever so slowly creeps towards shore.

I re-pack the bandage roll. Carefully tug on my shirt, don the cloak even though I prickle with uncomfortable heat. "Let's go," I stand, shake sand off the backpack and hug it in my arms. "Night doesn't last forever."

She paddles slightly closer to the shore. I plod away from the waves. Dusk light strikes the ash blanket a silvery-gray, the catapult a looming skinny structure across the distance. I walk, halfway on the shifting beach, halfway on the shifting ash, undecided on which is better.

Behind me, a jet bird caws and erupts from the shoreline, kicking a spray of sand and water in her wake.

***

When people approached the next dawn, dear dead, you hid. Hid as well as you could, you covered yourself in snow where the cave ceiling had collapsed. You tucked the sea cat's bones in the crook of your arm, shushed the jet bird squawking at the narrow air hole you left in the side.

None of the blood textures you recognized. You didn't bother distinguishing them beyond the numbers, five, you didn't want to know more than that, knowing none of them were Tatter-cloak.

They came quietly, didn't speak, walked as if it were the most boring thing in the world. As if snowbanks were less remarkable than the color of breath.

The remains of the house stood between you and the soldiers coming from the frost orchards. But you bit your lip, because last night beside the house you'd left a clear path through the snow, straight to your hiding place.

The jet bird squawked at the air hole, and you whispered, "are we thinking the same thing?" as if she had remembered the snow path at the same time as you, had considered the closing distance between the soldiers and the remains of the house.

Regardless, you punched the air hole wider and poked her free by the tail feathers. "Don't let them find us," you whispered, squinting over the dazzling snow. You guided her blood toward the plowed ice canyon winding all the way from where your window had been, so she could sweep over your tracks, or carve out dozens of new ones, confusing ones.

She, instead, shot into the air. You covered your eyes with your hands and held back a moan. Snowflakes settled on your knees through the hole, cold. You brushed them away, they melted into droplets in the tiny cavern warming with your body.

Of course, you hardly cared for the snowflakes dusting your knees. They just minded you while the jet bird rose into the air, and the five soldiers jumped at a growing speck of storm blood, stopping and gaping and trying to scatter. The jet bird cometed through the middle of five soldiers, tossing bodies perfectly outward. Snowflake droplets on the packed floor bounced.

All five rose back to their feet and sprinted away, lumbering, they either ran that poorly because of wide snowshoes or because they brought no snowshoes and scrambled through snowbanks.

The jet bird screamed, shaking the snowbank you cowered in. All the way from her crater opposite the house. The shaking blocked your air hole with tumbling ice, you poked fists and wrists into biting air to clear it. The jet bird's scream rolled outward, rolled upward, quaking as thunder. Your stomach concaved against the dizzying force of her scream, you pushed your shoulders up to try and cover your ears because your hands still guarded the air hole.

Beneath the scream, your arms vibrated with effort, your teeth rattled. If you tried to pull the sea cat together by taffy, certainly the taffy would have been ripped to pieces by sonic flogging, a blood ribbon would have disintegrated against a raging river.

The jet bird cometed in the middle of the soldiers, a roaring quake.

Muted snow.

Another sirening, undying scream, her blood lightning.

Translation: "leave us alone. Leave our house alone. Let us finally have peace."

Or, you pretended that's what the scream meant. As if the jet bird cared about that house, cared about being left alone, cared about your kind of peace.

***

"Let's go," I whisper to the jet bird, for the third time, from where I sprawl on the third beach, resting my legs; from where I plopped a heavy backpack in the pebbles to rest my quivering arms. "We need to hurry," I whisper, and check the half unfamiliar stars a third time, sighing at how much they've moved.

I carry the backpack on my shoulders this time. Tie the straps tightly around my hips and I stand unsteadily. The scabs on my back don't like that. But my arms do.

The jet bird launches into the air. I think she takes pity on me with these constant breaks. Either that, or she's more exhausted than I am, unable to fly through still air for longer than I can walk over dark terrain.

On weak limbs, I trudge through these night plains. Clouds of insects guide my path. Dizzyingly, they flit about the fields, rising and falling over rock clusters and stretches of sand. Crystalline blood marks my target, senses stretching a linear path between these quivering limbs and a child's steady sleep. Stepping where winged creatures take flight, I squint at the starlit grasses and rocks and ocean's shores.

Of dark terrain, night plains: to distract myself from the cuts up my back and the weakness in my knees, I hum. Name the sound prettier than buzzing insects, an actual melody instead of chaotic sound. My fingers flow like they could be a wind rushing through the reeds, rustling.

In truth, my humming dwindles a meager beauty--this plain, this night, the music swells in a jet bird's beating blood, thousands of thrashing wings, and tapping tiny animal hearts. My humming dwindles a meager beauty, a meager instrument string. A pale thread in a midst of red.

My self wanders in this tapestry, crosses a city of textures, spirals in a swirling whirlpool of blood pounding beneath skins. Soot. Sharp grass. Footstep-worn stones.

I float my palms together in front of me, like if I were stronger I could funnel a tunnel open through the insects. Like the glimmering lights could bob in cairn stones, marking my way home.

This is the tapestry. I am one heart, one blood, even when I bleed, I color the floors only aquamarine. My magic is an ocean, there. Whirling in storms, fury, love. If everything so monumental that takes over my heart, my blood, could exist outside of me, I...I could join continents together.

I am one heart, one blood, flourishing with power, until I am too weak to keep walking.

This is the tapestry: I sit to catch my breath a fourth time, heart a tempest, limbs quaking.

In a true weaving, cloth threads overlap like twisted clouds, but never leak into other colors, even if from a distance they all blur into one. This night, I belong in a city of textures, clouds of insects, but if I were to remove myself from the pattern and step away, all the textures might appear as one. A whole field made of swaying plants. A whole, before its parts. A cloud, before its insects.

But one insect knows nothing of another. The ribboning aquamarine in a midst of red might get named the snake in a fire, a river in an autumn forest. A whole, before its parts.

But I am only aquamarine. My whole being is merely a part. I could never step back and study the fire, the forest, see me as just a river snake. To me, I am an ocean; jittery, flowing, vast beneath a bird's storm.

And the power within me to never die, always remember--I believe it could encompass continents. I believe my ocean is that grand.

Yet I am a death mage. I kill the living by the dead with my existence, my magic, I feed on venomous things. The only continents I join together are the memories that haunt me, that ghost after me in sleepless nights.

The lie is we are all interconnected. We, who have never comprehended outside our own skins. We, who crave something called home because there we could never die and always remember. "I am enduring" I whisper and the grass echoes back beneath the moving stars and that would be enough to last years longer than heartache. A desperate sort of freedom that our oceans are big enough to be whole worlds, beating as one, bleeding as one, coloring the floors with complete forests and rivers.

What I mean is, this seemingly grand power within me is only a part. And is hardly as powerful as I believe.

Dear innumerable dead, atop my singular planet: weave us together, your enemies and strangers, our colors crushing into a distant ugly black, undazzling. Make us all one. Call us forever. String us up on a beam beside a fireplace, crackling. Leave us to disintegrate with months and moths and moments ever closer to crumbling.

Then, raise us from the dust so corroded and ancient we remember little more than our scars. Build us anew and let me go out into the world, crowned with eternity.