Shatterpoint

I don’t have a mother, but if I did, she would be a tear duct. I don’t talk about it — I know there’s something a little alien about me, but that’s not exactly why.

Question: How can something born of sadness ever be more than the sum of its parts?

Answer: It can’t. It will always be the product of sadness, born from a dragon’s tear shed over the destruction of war and conflict and the loss of new life. That will mark it forever, inescapably so.

At least, that’s what I believed, but if there was a way to get closure somehow, things would be different. They’d have to be.

 

I land on the crystallised dustbowl of a planet approximately two days before the spring cycle. Seasons are different on different worlds, but the leylines keep time. They always do. I don’t know why I was drawn to this place, but there’s something magical in the air.

The town is colloquially referred to as the Edge of Nowhere for its isolation. It had a real name, once; one that was probably given with love. Now, it’s the bottom of the barrel, chugging along on the coattails of a crystal mining industry that has slowed down considerably. It’s remote, sparsely populated with travellers who will pass through once and then forget they’ve ever been. I spread my fingers against the dusty ground, feeling the hum of something discordant buzz through my body. Some strange resonance, like an oddly melodic song, seeps right into my bones.

When I sleep, I don’t dream. I think dreaming is for the living, and I’m not quite living, but I’m not dead, either — that would imply I was alive at some point. I’m more automaton than flesh and blood. That’s why it’s so odd when that night, as I close my eyes for my deadsleep, I find myself walking towards the desert. I know, somehow, that there is a brutal tear in the ground itself. I also know that I need to go there. I don’t know what awaits me, out there in the endless liminal sandscape beyond the Edge.

I wake to darkness. I’ve been told that the local pub and lodge, the Watering Hole, is where most people convene at this time of day. Or night. When I press into the throng of people, the acrid smell of booze washing over me like a sordid wave, it’s with my wings boldly visible. I’m used to the looks, so maybe that’s why I don’t notice him. At least, not at first.

Fact: This isn’t my first time here. I’ve returned here time and time again since my inception, each time hoping to find something different. Things have always, unfailingly, been the same — until now. This time, I don’t just feel the earth. I feel someone else, too. I haven’t realised that yet.

“Do you know anyone with a half decent motorskip who could go out on the betweenland?” I ask the bartender. I’ve asked every time, but I’ve never felt the imperative need to be out there before.

Out on the betweenland is the Tear. Tear as in torn, not as in shed, although it makes sense in a way that they’re such similar words. The few people who do live here avoid it like the plague. Too dangerous, they say. Well, maybe it is, for a living being. If I get hurt, I can just stick myself back together.

“Told you last time you was ‘ere,” the bartender replies, “ain’t nobody gonna take you to the Tear.”

Double negatives. It should make a positive, but out on the Edge, it doesn’t.

I haven’t paid the hulking mass hunched over the bar beside me any notice until now, but at the mention of the Tear, it seems to rearrange itself in its layers of black and leather. One huge hand, circled around a glass of amber whiskey, clenches as if to make a fist.

“I’ll take you.”

He doesn’t have that Edge twang to his voice. An outsider, then. Like me. There’s not a single inch of his body that isn’t covered in swathes of fabric. His hands are gloved.

I smile. It’s not really a natural expression for me — none of these mortal displays of emotion are. I don’t really know how to feel emotions the way they do.

“Thank you.”

He tosses back the drink and huffs out something that could be a laugh, but that doesn’t feel quite right, because I haven’t done anything funny.

“Don’t thank me. You’re going to your death out there.”

 

He tells me his name. I tell him mine. By the time I convince him to go into the Tear with me, we’re almost close enough that I can read the sadness and worn tiredness in the fibres of his muscles.

I wonder if I look that sad. He’s got deep, soulful eyes, filled with a life of regret and another life of denial. I wonder if his third life will be different. Maybe this will bring him as much closure as it will bring me.

I don’t know why I think that, but it doesn’t feel wrong. There’s something about him that tells my magic we’re kindred. I can’t figure out how. He’s not a dragon, but there’s a little bit of draconic aura around him, broken and diminished as it is.

When he finally tells me why, it makes sense. I don’t know how to reassure him.

He pulls off the glove, revealing a crystal hand. I place my smaller palms over his, barely pressing.

“You’re like me.”

It’s the first time anyone has said that to him. It’s the first time I’ve said it to anyone, too.

I kiss him. He kisses back.

 

It’s an egg. The whole planet is an egg, partially destroyed during the Void Wars, and at its centre is a dead foetus, bleeding amniotic fluid that the miners have been harvesting in the form of powerful crystals for centuries. But it’s drying up now. It’s been drying up for a long time.

When he sees it, he goes white with shock. When I tell him I’m here to destroy it, he opposes it vehemently.

Why? I thought we had an understanding. I don’t get why he’s reacting like this. It’s so human.

 

He shatters me.

 

“I can’t do it,” he says to me when I reopen my eyes, shatterpoints shakily reattached with a large and clumsy hand. “I can’t do what they did to me.”

I tilt my head to the side. “You were alive. This one is not.”

He shakes his head, running his crystal hand through his shaggy hair, and sighs deeply. It’s the sigh of an old, old man.

“It’s desecration,” he says.

I’m confused. “What do you mean by that?”

He seems frustrated. “Messing with the dead. Messing with the dead of dragons.” He reaches out to touch me, then retreats as if burned. “It’s not something that’s done.”

He’s scared, I realise. This hulking warrior of ages past is scared of — what? What is he scared of? The egg? The remnants of a dead foetus, life that never was? Or me?

“I can’t leave things as they are,” I say instead of voicing any of these questions. It’s unlike me. If I have a question, I ask it. But right now, I know that if I were to ask any of those questions, he’d shatter as easily as I did beneath the weight of his chains. Maybe not on the outside, but internally.

He lets out that deep sigh again.

“I know.”

 

When we lay it to rest, he cries fat, bubbling tears. In another world, he would have been a fully fledged dragon. I could have been born from tears like those.

When we lay it to rest, I feel nothing at all. I thought it would be different.

I thought it would be the end.

“No, Angel,” he whispers into my hair that night, camped beside a fire. “It’s just the beginning.”