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C H A P T E R S I X
Pagan sun in vacuous black
Episode 001 (Romance Dawn)
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THERE WAS A starved dog gone feral lodged on Roronoa Zoro's throat. It hated the hand that fed it and the hand that healed it, but, most vehemently, it hated the hand that placed it there. When Zoro opened his mouth, the starved dog barked and barked and barked while pagan comeuppance befell the unlucky member of the Pandemonium facing it. The starved dog's aphonic barking would only cease once it was besotted by catharsis and the liberation of the pharmakos, but rosaries and empty prayers did little but anger the starved dog.
The starved dog ripped the bare flesh of the stab in Zoro's back and howled at the sun when the sky cleared, but the starved dog also fetched the echo of tender trust in the form of softened touch and a warm caress and wailed under the moon, derelict and apostate. The starved dog, for all its barking, wouldn't bite.
When the starved dog was simply a visceral longing (a vulture circling a carcass, crows looming over a graveyard), there was only a boy draped under summer heat enamoured by the ocean and her children, sun-blessed (not yet sanguinolent, Eden was paradise before the war).
The mantle of sun-gleams between the showers and the petrichor of gossamer rain was nothing if not beautiful against the shadows, so pious and benevolent that the light drowned him in homeless plights of salvation and begged to envision the darkness and commit to the teachings (condemnation before birth, is preconception divine justice or the pleasure of a traitor? If the tragedy is preordained, it is futile to resist. Think Pheroras and Graphina, Orpheus and Eurydice, Hero and Leander). Dressed in peony perfume on silk with a crushed cherry in the back of his tongue and waltzes for the windstorm, the beak of the vulture was blunt and the murder too easy to scare away.
Dangling on the leash of his own longing, it was his need that grew teeth and bit for him when the hand of the prophet knocked on his door with the aide-memoire of the prerogative (isn't bitting the same as touching? Ignore the pain and it's equally as intimate). Every reading of the tragedy ended in slaughter, but the starved dog still flinched back when the swing sped (it was never easy to accept powerlessness, at the end of the script it was revealed that the tragic hero was dead all along).
The wasteland of his rotten memory — of her, for her, about her, with her, from her, some days it felt like his every breath was dedicated to grieve the lull of a laugh and tilt of a smile — promised mutually assured destruction and saw in the mouth of the ouroboros a grave (it was mortifying to be the one that remembered), and the starved dog continued to bark until the dead talked back.
