They lay entwined, no space between their forms; no chance for space, for their bond was formed of something no physical thing could divide. The sound of breathing echoed, rhythmic yet unbroken, for in each pause another's breathing came; the air cycled constantly between them, one drawing it in, the other letting it go, releasing it to the sky in erratic little spirals that their eyes, if no other eyes in this world, could track. The currents around them rippled and tugged, uncertain, pulled this way and that.

Luc focused on the breathing, drinking in its rise-fall and fall-rise as if in the twists of its echoes all the world's secrets would be revealed, if only he spiralled far, far enough down into the place where semblance of meaning fell apart and all was just sound, high and low and loud and soft, devoid of context, stripped of logic. There was a point at which, if you listened to a pattern for long enough, it really did seem to break apart, shed its familiarity, and you lost your place in the spiral, forgot which parts were the breathing and which parts were not. Before long, it had begun to sound much less like breathing at all, and more like the beating of wings.

His eyes were closed, and he dared not open them, for fear, perhaps, that the brush of feather-tips against his skin would prove to be imagined-- or, he was not certain either way, for fear that they would prove to be real. He barely remembered the feathers, the sensation of white-light incandescent, nothing like real feathers' touch but in and through and pure and there, more there than any touch he'd ever felt all but purged from his mind by the pain; the memory of eclipsing agony concentrated somewhere within him he could not place, arising from somewhere deeper than heart or gut or skull, somewhere more fundamental. But the memory had taken root, even if he could not summon it at will, and the thought of feathers, of wings as old and cold as the skies, filled him with a strange emotion. It had once been far less complex to his mind; he would have called it horror, a gripping, blind cruelty, like pondwater in the lungs. But that description hardly seemed to fit any more with this curious pulse within him, this longing, its edges laced with only a few lingering, token flickers of fear.

He felt again that fluttering on his skin, sweet forest air blown up into his face and giving him no choice but to breathe it, the scents of pine and honeysuckle and the freshness of a fast-approaching storm forming into pictures in his mind. Memories? --are these the visions the Rune shows when I'm not pushing it away? --and all at once his heart was filled with a light, giggly feeling, like a child's triumphant crowing tossed on summer winds, a carnival fanfare buzzing through distant evening air; it seemed to say, you understand!

No-- that would only be the crudest of interpretations. For you understand was only one of countless threads that cavorted and danced like leaves through the Rune's expression, threads that said I love you and I'm sorry, threads of skylark's joy and warm sun-touched winds, threads of regret and mutual suffering at pains great and small-- defining years lost to confinement and neglect, the arrow that had pierced his shoulder; discomforts and sorrows he didn't remember now, their images like watercolours from a childhood book. And somewhere in the maelstrom, a memory of tearing beyond tearing, of soul's blood thick with copper and ash and the wrongness of itself, blood of something that should never bleed, of bonds broken in helpless, desperate reluctance and an escape that was no freedom; the memory reflected on his own, but it was not his own, and yet they were the same, and with the bitter taste of realisation in his throat he swallowed tears. He caught many of the threads, felt them stroke across his mind bringing ripples of new emotion, but some of them still streaked by him, out of reach, twining glitter in silver-white swallowed up by blue horizons. He did not chase them, was not unsettled by imperfect clarity; for those things that swirled and darted out of reach he did not fear. No dire omen, he thought now, no portent of a cruel fate, lingered beyond his understanding. They were united, as they were meant to be, and all that was out there beyond him was the safety of endless, endless skies.

Confident now in the understanding of each, they whispered to each other, patterns in the constant sound of breathing, fractals encoded in the white noise of wind. If the whispers had been words, they would have told of a force of nature who only desired to twine around this young boy's heart; to devote itself, wholly, forever, to swear that they would never be torn apart. They would have told of misunderstanding and fear, of visions warped into nightmares by a mind that refused to believe, so clouded by pain that all offerings of comfort were turned to grisly spectres of a future dead and grey, a singular image that became the only one he would hear out. They would have told of two who died inside as they tore apart themselves and each other, a soul that was always meant to be one rent in two by hatred and fear; the heartbreak of one felt by only himself, isolated by bars and by his own illusions, and of the other, by all the world that touched the wind. But they were not words, and so they told of these things and a thousand more. Words could be hollow, words could lie, but this communication was only truth.



And so it was that a bishop walking the ramparts of his temple home, and at once a world away, received a message upon the breeze. For the wind that had chilled him to the bone since childhood no longer made him ache, but was only a warm embrace; the discord that had once divided earth and sky dissolved, in the acceptance of a windspun soul.