Stay awhile. You could use the rest. This place could be safe enough now.

These are the lies I like, dwelling in the corner of a cabin. Waking up early to mix mortar for brick-layers, wandering the plains looking for the gray stones the old man brought every day, that he ground to powder and mixed up in a bag.

The first few days the brick-layers give me odd glances, as I stir pots of mortar by myself. Each morning I add water to what was left behind, trickle in sand to make it seem more. Each mid-day I comb the plains and the beaches for rocks that would look gray ground up, with dark speckles of green, how I remember the old man doing it. I experiment in the evenings with patches of plains dirt; end up with slick mud, watery sand, drying out quickly into useless mush.

Over the days, the consistency thins, too easy to stir even with little water. The color skews, instead of gray-brown goop I end up with yellow-brown, watery sand. Was I ever supposed to put sand in it? Sand from the beach was merely the closest kind of powder I could find.

I could use the rest, I tell myself, hesitantly asking the first man who shows up for brick-laying if he knows anything about how to make mortar gray. He doesn't speak to me. I fidget with my hands. He turns his back and climbs on a bench to reach the rising wall of bricks. I remember, I was a mortar-mixer in the first place because I am an outsider. And in this place, outsiders must get ignorance from the who-knows-how-important house builders.

Stay awhile, I mutter, crossing my legs on the ground and stirring a wide pot of watery sand. "Why am I staying awhile?"

Of course, it is for the food. The food a woman leaves for me and the child on a round table by the door. How I'd feel guilty taking it without trying to do something for her town.

But, I don't know what I'm doing. And I'm an outsider, what do I owe them? It is not like we rebuild my house, my home, not like the mornings of achy arms and stirring sticks have built anything I will ever live inside of.

Before any other brick-layers arrive, I leave. Dust my cloak off of packed ash. I tread a roundabout route through the streets back to the child, our corner of a cabin. Most days, he sleeps well into the morning and I cannot rouse him. It is no different this morning, despite my loud footsteps in the door, the creaking floor, despite my whisperings and my adjusting the wrinkled cloak he sleeps under. I exhale, count his breaths in the dim cabin in time with the heartbeats of his crystalline jagged blood.

I take a scratchy-skinned fruit from the loaded table, bottles and breads, and quietly exit. Quietly, as if I'm trying not to wake the child. I stroll past Green-limb's place where she and the woman work everyday--so the woman tells me each night, but not about what they work on.

My feet return me to the scene of that night, the child muttering curses from a rooftop. These fingers trace the corner where I scaled to the rooftop, tried to talk him down from his blood spirals calling a burner here.

I lift my arms in the humid air and pinwheel, those senses rubbing the blood textures in the ring of Sleeping Cabins. Named so for the comatose families still prey to a mind curse, all itchy sand and crushed petals and fluffy cotton, drearily unaware.

Those senses stretch further. The jet bird fancies herself a fishing bird this day, diving into the water and awkwardly flapping to keep under the waves. Children sleep under cramped quilts, toss and turn in the morning heat. A stone mage hasn't left his bed and cries often, I think the town thinks he caused the Sleeping Cabin people and got caught in it too.

I quit spinning, nausea growing in my aching head. My boots have flattened the grass into an uneven ring. The empty cabin within the circle of Sleeping Cabins used to be ours, do any of the brick-layers know that, does Green-limbs or her aunt know that? How incriminating that this used to be ours; two death mages, a mind curse holding unconscious hostages. Do they know stone mages don't know how to do this? Do they know this stone mage only succumbed to a bed of a lonely lover he couldn't stand up to, but one day might?

"Stay awhile," I mutter, leaning against wooden timbers. I wince at the scabs on my back. Stay awhile, as if I could join the comatose people in never leaving. As if by never leaving I could go about lifting a mind curse I don't even comprehend.

***

Dear dead, you joined a convoy of wagons, journeyed up a grand, winding road, back to the child you must have been at some point. Or at least the places that child played, slept, ate; dreamed unimaginable things.

You claimed a walking spot by the back wagon of the convoy, hugged your cloak close against the wind and kept most of your supplies in a gray sack with an achy shoulder strap. Spare boots. A change of clothes. Hairbrush. Bandages.

The food rations they kept in the wagons; black, imposing things of square angles, peaked roofs and squeaking wheels, tugged by massive-pawed mammals. The animals hissed at you through heavy fur whenever you came close; distant relatives of the sea cat you supposed, they probably blamed you for what happened.

The jet bird--often flying behind the caravan--disliked the animals (snow cats?) too. Whenever she nested in the shoulder-strap sack, she squawked a blustery storm at the hissing of their gales.

Every day you climbed higher into the mountains, breath heavier, and the jagged black rocks and the slim yellow plants grew more unfamiliar.

Coming home, finding lost fragments of who you used to be--this trip was not that. It was just walking. Trudging up a grand, grimy road with sweaty feet to somewhere it seemed you had never been before.

After days, the wagon convoy arrived at a mining town, still and cloaked by sunset. You left the wagon camp and trekked the streets alone, shouts of families echoing through the stone houses, your arms outstretched like memories would leap out at you and that way you could catch them and garland them together.

You had no memory of the way to the town you lived in. Only that a solitary peak rose high above the valley, that there was a river somewhere, that it was amongst the mountains. And that it certainly wasn't this mining town. Probably.

The next mid-afternoon, the wagon wheels squeaked away from the town, merchants barking orders at the weary animals. You trudged beside the final wagon, reaching out for a familiar blood texture. A skeleton sized exactly right. But of course blood and skeletons meant nothing to you before Kolariq found you. You had no current tugging you home through the valleys, through the winding roads, a path could point icicle straight and you still wouldn't recognize the town waiting for you at the end of it.

At night, tracing the stars in the violet-tinged sky, whispering stories to yourself of the bird flocks who stole songs from the richest kings, it struck you. The jet bird, you, Tatter-cloak--none of you had clear memories of your parents. Unless birds remembered things from inside eggshells. But you, you came to the mountains on the off chance you would have a parent who would love you, hug you and tell you it'd be alright. That because every home you ever had burned up, maybe you had a secret home hidden faraway, safe forever.

But of course, you didn't have that. Hadn't had that ever since you forgot who raised you.

You couldn't fall asleep that night, amidst chirping insects, tiny as an insect yourself in the wide mountain plains, sharp winds so far from an ocean. But you hardly blamed the insects, the vastness, the dry air for your sleeplessness.

Rather, it was the wagon beasts sleeping in a towering, furry pile hardly a leg's-reach away. You didn't move though because other sleeping people possessed the tramped-out grass and you didn't want to disturb them. You didn't move because, impractically, beside the rear wagon was your walking spot. Your sleeping spot. The black wheel with the red spots on the one spoke had greeted you each sunrise and you thought they might miss you in the morning if you weren't there. Silly, really. You knew that. This wagon had met many mornings without you there.

In the song-stealing flock of stars, you thought up names for each bird. Kolariq became the one faintly colored magenta. The guard named Oversized-shield you set as the smaller of two twin stars nearly overlapping, the Empress' envoy was the one larger. The dots making a pair of yellow-white wings you labeled simply fire. The shadows of violet-tinged clouds shaped into army, a dead king times two took a cluster of weak triangles.

Like a flock stole all the songs from you, the rich royal. Like this flock of names and colors could account for how you ended up there, in a mountain valley that certainly wasn't your home hidden far away. Take apart the blame, heap it on the bad people, or yourself, who even cares, you whispered. It had happened.

Like the names for the birds were actual skeletons with physical beating hearts, you scrawled symbol curses in the air. You drew curls in complex shapes, one for each evil bird, one for each glaring star, like you were a royal, an Empress ruling many continents, and they were jealous of the way you sang. A flock, coming for your comforting songs. Your hands flew like you needed curses to defend yourself from their attacks.

Air-scribbled symbols from an ocean in your mind fell apart as quick as your hands could move, nothing concrete to latch onto. And a golden eyelid from the heap of furry beasts cracked open, so you stopped moving your hands. Froze them still, until the eyelid shut, then they dropped to your sides.

So you, naturally, screamed silent curses at the stars. The twinkling glitters couldn't replace the palpitations of a heart, the colors were no replacement for blood textures but oh, you had names. In your mouth, the ocean of your mind, you cut Kolariq down like crusted cake. A king's eradication fell from your lips even though you only met him once and already did that. You melted a king's friend spine to wax, liquified it. Whoever burned down your house you cursed quick and sudden as a severed artery near their hearts--as in, internal bleeding, pain, slow and drawn out. Then your breath ran out, and you quit screaming silently, and your mouth prickled with violent words.

For an exhale, the stars dimmed. You imagined.

"And why do you care?" you muttered, rolling onto your side. You bumped against the shoulder-strap sack but the jet bird inside didn't stir. "Who cares? It happened."

And yet you were there, alone amongst a wagon convoy, hoping for a home that didn't exist. It happened. Your body and your mind and your memories burned with liberation under all that happened. "And so what?" you muttered, but shut your mouth at the creaking of a glinting golden eye from a heap of pale beasts. You glared back until the golden winked out, but the stars didn't, and you still couldn't fall asleep.