Saeque
Legacy Name: Saeque

He was a boy.

A boy with amber-golden eyes and hair the colour of crushed red velvet. The sort of boy that looked untouchable, like his collarbones could cut you, or he might just fall apart under your fingertips.He was the sort of boy that made hoarse drowning noises when he cried and wondered what his soul looked like. The sort of boy that lived on nothing but cigarette smoke and old movies for days, then gorged himself on curry or pho.He was the sort of boy that woke up at 3 am to write poetry on the white white walls of his apartment, fall asleep again, and awake later bewildered by his own cryptic words. But he just took those dream-prophesies and strapped them to rhythms he pounded out on his guitar and called them songs.

Above all, he was the sort of boy who loved to sing.

He worked at a flower stand at the downtown market and spent all day charming middle-aged women into buying armfuls of lilies and dahlias. There were always violets in his hair, honeysuckle perched between his teeth or roses twirling in his fingers. But no matter how many flowers touched him, he always smelled faintly of the night blooming jasmine that grew in front of a certain used book shop.The bricks of the store were covered in oddly academic graffiti and most of the shelves inside were bare. The store itself was of little importance, but every evening he took his guitar and sang to the jasmine plant, as well as anyone who walked by. He sang about women with rivers for hair, old men with soft wings tucked between their shoulder blades, children wearing gowns of butterflies and love letters written inside seashells. The words were sweet, but his voice was salt on open wounds.There was a roughness, a rawness to his throat and the way his teeth gritted after he bit off the ends of stanzas. His songs made grown men cry and soon people began to call him Orpheus.

But he was not Orpheus.

No flowers bloomed when he sang, no trees uprooted themselves, no animals flocked and no stones rolled closer. No thing and no one could bear to listen to him. No one, but a single woman.

She was beautiful, with skin the colour of sunlight through honey and huge, dark eyes. There was an understanding between the two of them: she came to listen every night and wept silently for hours. He simply played, never asking what her story was; she preferred it that way. But one evening the songs were not enough, she wanted more than his owl-faced goddesses and dream catchers. She invited him out for coffee as he was packing up his guitar, and he agreed. They sipped their lattes in silence, staring at each other with a strange sort of reverence. To him, she was the only one who listened, the only one who seemed to understand those burning emotions he wanted to express but was never quite sure he found the words for. To her, he was a blade with which to lance a boil, a heavy cyst of hurt she carried in her chest.

And that was how it was every night after that, until once again it was not enough for her. No matter how long she wept, she no longer felt that ease afterward, the cleansing. Instead it was replaced by an ugly wanting, a need for him, for his voice. He was no longer that blade, but instead something like a music box; something pretty to be opened and closed for her own enjoyment. And so she lured him into her house by the river, its once austere beauty twisted into a mass of broken windows and peeling paint. It was there that she turned on him and made him her own personal song bird.

He was used to waking up inside a cage, but not one quite so literal.

Its strange what too much suffering can do to a person. She could have spent her days quietly, waiting to die. Instead, she decided to use what she had learned in the years spent reading ancient books from second hand book stores: she changed him into a bird. A small, crimson bird with the sweetest, saddest voice. It was kept locked in a cage at the foot of her bed and she made it sing to her all day and into the night until its throat was raw, and still she made it sing. It sang until there was no meaning left, no comfort to be found in the strange sounds coming from its beak.

She raged.

There was no soul in the tones coming from her songbird, none of his heart-wrenching gentleness; she had made a genius into an animal. It was then that she left him alone, going in search of a way to turn him back. While she was gone, he stayed silent for three days and three nights, resting. On the fourth day he opened his mouth and sang quietly to himself with all the emotion he had kept from her; why should he reward the person who had put him here? As he sighed out the notes, a heat gathered in his chest; it rose up his throat, something akin to the feeling of needing desperately to cry but being unable to. In a vain attempt to rid himself of it, he pushed his notes even higher and stronger.

He burst into flames.

His shock was so great that the fire subsided almost immediately, and he was greatly relieved to find that he had not immolated himself. She returned later that night and he twittered away at her until she threw a book at his cage, sending it clattering to the floor; there it stayed, beneath a book of silly incantations. She stayed in that room for a month, hardly sleeping or eating, feeding him only the scraps she had no stomach for. When she left again, he was left with a few crusts of bread to tide him over. She came and went many times over the next few months, feeding him just enough that he never starved. That is, until one day during one of the coldest months, when he found himself close to death. But all the anger, resentment, sorrow and pity he had been keeping tightly bottled over the last few weeks made his escape a small possibility in his mind. Gathering a lungful of stale air, he sang. He sang as if to shake mountains, as if his voice were the fuse to an unlit bomb hidden in his ribcage. He sang so beautifully that the metal of his cage could not bear to hold him and melted around his flaming wings, freeing him. And thus, her spell was broken. He stepped from the pool of metal a man, but not a man unscarred.

No man can spend a year as a songbird and remain unscathed.

He had aged, even in his time as a bird; he was older, taller, thinner. His hair was longer and his eyes were deeper set, more tortured. But the biggest change was the pair of large, ragged wings upon his back. The fire had cleansed him of all other remnants of his time as a bird, but a pair of twisted, partially burnt wings hung there, smoking quietly. The scent of burning feathers filled the air and he picked up his dusty guitar. There was no apartment to go back to, no friends to find. There was only his guitar and the new found power of his voice. He walked slowly from her house wearing his old, worn clothes, and out into the snow; steam rose from where the flakes touched his skin. His lips pulled into a crooked smile and set off, barefoot, to find his little jasmine plant.

When he reached the book store, the walls had been sandblasted clean and the gutters were full of cigarette butts. The plant was dead. Crouching down, he kissed its brittle leaves and sang it one last song; his words singed it to its roots. And from there he went on to write new songs and play them on tiny stages for people who crowded in to see a man with charred, useless wings held like a banner behind him. Some of them remembered the man who could make them cry, but these new songs were different. His voice still brought them almost to tears, but his new intensity frightened them. He played his guitar until his fingers bled and he didn't have the strength to stand, he just knelt on the stage and whispered the lyrics into the mic.

Whatever he had been before had been destroyed in the fire.
He was now a new sort of creature entirely.




Profile by the amazing Revel