These gilded bones may b.., p.1
These Gilded Bones May Bloom, page 1
THESE GILDED BONES MAY BLOOM
C. G. HONER
LANCE & LETTERS PRESS
THESE GILDED BONES MAY BLOOM
Copyright © C. G. Honer, 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN: 979-8-9867762-0-0 (Hardcover)
ISBN: 979-8-9867762-2-4 (Paperback)
ISBN: 979-8-9867762-1-7 (ebook)
First Edition: January 2023
Published by Lance & Letters Press LLC
Cover Design by: Franziska Stern, coverdungeonrabbit.com
Hard Case Design by: Carmen Di Mauro
To my Grandma Barbara
Happy hour next week is on me.
These Gilded Bones May Bloom Spotify Playlist
Songs are ordered 1-29 and correlate to each individual story.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Content Warning
Her Broken Promise
List of Goddesses
Romantic Entrapments
Life Cycle of Forests
One Final Offering
The Way Cities Breathe
ABCs of Thievery
The Light He Steals
Boy, Hunter, Prey
A Pinch of Salt
This Is How We End
Souls at Midnight
Shades of Us
The Uninvited Ghost
Dead Body, High Soul
85th and Lexington
Summer Blues
Nights He Spent Watching
The Side Effects of Love
Luck Like Sour Candy
The Thief and You
They Call Her Beloved
This River All Hunger and Rot
Glamorous Façades
Obligatory Beach Day Filler Episode
A Rose By Any Other Name
Vengeance of the Deep
Gray Expectations
To Brave the Sea
This Is How We Begin
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
The Author and You
Artist Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
About the Author
*
FOREWORD
Dearest Reader,
It’s my birthday.
Okay, maybe not right now, as you’re reading this. For all I know, it’s the middle of October or a major holiday or your birthday. But this book, this collection of stories and art, was published on January 29th, 2023. My golden birthday.
As the middle child of five, and the last to celebrate a golden birthday, I decided I needed to do something way cooler than any of my siblings—like publish a book. Knowing there were no guarantees I could land an agent/publishing deal by that fated, golden day, I pondered the idea of doing it myself. In March 2022, These Gilded Bones May Bloom was born.
I’d like to say I started from scratch, just me and an empty page, but that would be a lie. One of my favorite parts of this anthology is that it’s set in worlds I know. They’re lands I have explored, they’re characters I’ve been friends with for years. Some of these stories won contests, some of them lost contests, and some (most) of them are completely new.
The past year has included hours of drafting, revising, and formatting, and it’s weird as (insert your comfort curse word here) that the book is done. It’s published. It’s in your hands. I hope so much that you enjoy these stories, but at the end of the day, even if you hate them with every fiber of your being and make it your mission to become my nemesis, I’m still proud of these words and these stories and these characters.
To my friends and enemies and everyone in between, thank you for celebrating my birthday with me. May the words ahead ease the pressures of reality for a little while.
– C. G. Honer
CONTENT WARNING
Some of the following stories include mature themes with depictions of blood, violence, and referenced abuse. For a full list of content warnings, please visit cghonerwrites.com/books
HER BROKEN PROMISE
Far above the city, clothed in the gray mist of night, Aine can almost pretend the red and orange hues below are that of a sunset, a warm glow offering one final caress to the city before evening sweeps in. She can almost pretend the colors have nothing to do with fires built by the humans she gave life to, the lungs she filled and the hearts she started, now cutting each other down over something as petty as territory.
The clouds rumble, fueled by anger and grief and her failures displayed before her. When the world inhaled its first breath, every forest taking root and oceans pouring down from the heavens, all of it bowed. It knew her instinctively and answered to her voice. Maybe she’d made a mistake in giving humanity free will and the chance to know power like hers. To create and exist without rules. Freedoms they waste on war.
Her eyes are drawn back to the battlefield and the city burning itself down. Something akin to pain radiates within her, bursts of electricity and the growl of thunder. The echoes of her children dying. Men and women, young and old, all created for a purpose bigger than fighting a war or dying as its casualty.
All at once, in every corner of the sky, she hears her name spoken in a ragged whisper. A daughter who hasn’t called to her in many years.
Aerilyn.
Aine always promised no favorites, no creation more loved or hated than another. But some challenge that promise, their names and heartbeats as familiar as her own. Few are as familiar to her as Aerilyn.
In the past, when Aine’s anger lashed across the skies and the clouds wept over her creations, Aerilyn would venture out into the storms. Her small body wobbled across muddy fields and through puddles until she reached a grove of trees at the edge of her father’s farm. With soaked clothes and coiled hair made wild by the wind, she’d pick a tree and climb, a pair of large, rusting binoculars swinging from the string around her neck. She brought them every time without fail, sat on the branches and searched for Aine. She asked questions. Told secrets. Spoke nonsense into the storm until the skies were clear and her goddess smiled.
And now, somewhere in the smoke and rubble, Aerilyn needs her.
Aine searches past the warriors, past the flames and anger thick in the air, until her eyes stop on a soldier. On her little forest princess. Barely fifteen and dressed in armor, her frail body leaning against a crumbling building. Aine knows her every battle scar, had watched her stay behind with the injured because she couldn’t bear to let them suffer death alone. And now she is the injured one, facing death without company.
“Aine, please.” Aerilyn holds a hand against her chest, fingers red and useless to slow the life spilling out. “Help me.”
She remembers the second Aerilyn stopped looking for her. When the clouds were only clouds, and Aine became a figment of her childhood. When Aerilyn buried her father and swore never to say Aine’s name again. That silence and distance broke Aine, but this was worse.
“I’m scared,” Aerilyn says, as though she’s that small child once again. The one that picked daffodils and napped with calves, spent restless nights nursing sick animals back to health. The one that joined her kingdom’s military because it provided food and shelter and belonging, all the things she couldn’t find or afford in an empty farmhouse.
Aerilyn’s fear, now, is liquid. The weight of it wants to drag Aine down, toward the ashes and the broken bodies of her children. Lives she spent careful time crafting, dreaming of the things they’d do and the joy they’d experience. Lives she stepped back from so they could flourish. Some had. But many also endured pain. They took on heartbreak and struggle, and she watched it all from a distance, tucked away in the clouds.
She can stand silent no longer.
Aine pours into the city. Shouts go up as her presence shrouds the streets in darkness and distant starlight. Most only see shadows, not realizing their goddess walks among them, silencing the noise of war and bloodshed, if only for a few moments.
Aerilyn is quiet, hands limp at her sides. She doesn’t move when Aine appears, eyes barely cracked open and skin cool to the touch. She’s not long for this life.
“Aerilyn,” Aine whispers, brushing her fingers over the girl’s forehead, covered with sweat and dirt and everything the burning city thought to touch her with.
At Aine’s voice, like the sea and the winds, Aerilyn’s gaze finds her. Aine bears little resemblance to humanity, eyes like glowing embers and a galaxy in her skin. Clouds hang off her like a gown, hair an ever-moving mist capturing rays of color and firelight.
“I thought you might not hear me,” Aerilyn says with a broken sob.
The last time Aerilyn called, the soil of her father’s grave was fresh beneath her fingernails. She offered Aine every ounce of her anger, screaming until her voice went hoarse and her body collapsed to the ground. She didn’t deserve to bear that pain. She didn’t deserve this, either.
“I will always hear you.” Aine takes Aerilyn’s hand, the girl spending what little strength she has left to grip Aine’s hand like she used to grip her father’s. “Always.”
“I missed you,” Aerilyn says, and it cracks something inside of Aine. “I’m sorry.” Her breath comes faster, eyes losing focus. “I didn’t mean what I said.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Aine promises, gripping her hand tighter. “You’re safe.”
As if those words were all she needed, Aerilyn’s heart beats its last.
Aine wants to level the city. She wants to level the world. Sweep out her hands and erase it all. Rebuild it as something better, something less jagged to the touch. What does it matter if she promised no favorites? None more loved or hated than another? Aerilyn isn’t just one more creation, she’s kindness that braves storms and battlefields and the sorrows of death.
She is hope.
A reflection of the goddess she loved and the goddess she hated.
Aine makes a choice, one that will leave scars on the cosmos. She calls all of creation to listen, every drop of water and grain of sand, every tree in the forest and star in the sky, and then Aine breaks her promise. She knows, somehow, that it won’t be the last time. That others will come, like Aerilyn, to join her. To be echoes that cover every inch of the world. To be all that Aine should’ve been, all she will be now. More than a goddess in the clouds. More than a solitary figure.
“Rise,” she says, breathing life back into Aerilyn. Not her body, cold and dormant. Not her soul, too small for life such as this. Instead, when Aerilyn wakes, it’s to the heavens. It’s to creation all around her, bowing to her.
It’s as Aerilyn, Goddess of Life.
LIST OF GODDESSES
Aine
High Goddess of the Nine
Aerilyn
Goddess of Life
Azariel
Goddess of Death
Ademar
Goddess of Harvest
Aviv
Goddess of Seasons
Ahava
Goddess of Love
Arinya
Goddess of Wisdom
Amihan
Goddess of Elements
Alesia
Goddess of War
ROMANTIC ENTRAPMENTS
“I need you.”
Sarai has imagined hearing those words from Gennady a thousand times. She imagined he might come to her in the rain, golden hair soaked and droplets running down the angles of his face. That he’d fall to his knees, press her hands to his mouth, and say those words, say her name with the desperation that he uses now. But desperation is all that exists outside of her imaginings. There’s no rain; the air is dry with summer’s heat. And he isn’t on his knees. He isn’t even looking at her when he says it. He’s focused on Inessa and Ephraim, walking arm in arm through the village, staring at each other the way Sarai stares at Gennady.
Not that he’s ever noticed.
“Inessa can’t marry him,” Gennady says. “She won’t be happy.” He chews on his thumb, a childhood habit Sarai has watched him carry into their almost adulthood.
“They look content to me,” Sarai answers, ignoring the downturn of his mouth. He wants her to say how much happier Inessa looks at his side. As the only daughter of Lord Henry, their village leader, Inessa is more sought after than most, and as such no one has any qualms with the fact she’s courting multiple boys. But Gennady and Ephraim are the front-runners, their fathers squabbling with Lord Henry over who is more deserving of Inessa’s dowry.
Gennady runs his hands over his face, dirt caked beneath his nails. He’s taken on work from several farms, hopeful he’ll have a wife and family soon, a home of his own. “It doesn’t matter how she acts,” he says between his fingers. “She doesn’t want to be with him.”
“How do you know?” It isn’t the question she truly wants to ask, the words why not me buried deep in her chest. She knows more than anyone that the heart can’t be swayed by logic. Countless times, her mind has tried to convince her to leave, begin again outside of this small village. But it never wins. Her heart is too loud.
“I just know, Sarai.” He drops his hands. “There was this moment, a few days ago, she and I snuck off to the hot springs.”
“I don’t want to hear this.”
He laughs, as if it’s a joke. “Pull your head from the muck, I’m a gentleman.” Then he grins. “Well, mostly. But when you’re naked in a hot spring, isn’t it a tiny bit inevitable that things get heated?”
Her heart whimpers in her chest. “I wouldn’t know.”
“You will.”
She seriously doubts that. “Why do you need me?” she asks before he can launch back into the moment he and Inessa shared. “I don’t see how I could be any help in winning over Inessa.”
“Can’t you use your powers—”
Sarai turns sharply, sticking her hand over his mouth. “Do you want the whole village to know?”
Half a century ago, the goddesses, all nine of them, began to bestow their power on individuals they deemed fit, bloodlines they found worthy. It came as no surprise that humankind sought to use it, powerless rulers capturing daughters and sons and making them into weapons. Sarai was blessed by Ademar, Goddess of the Harvest. She doesn’t know what she’s done to deserve this power, but she can make things grow in the worst conditions. And Gennady knows it.
If she was wiser, she would’ve fled to one of the larger cities without telling a soul about what she could do, condemning herself to living in the crowds and obscurity. But she’d hoped that being a priestess, a daughter blessed by the goddesses, might lead to Gennady falling in love with her. Instead he fell for Inessa, and now Sarai fears he’ll slip up. If she’s found out, her life will belong to Lord Henry. He’s as desperate as any other ruler in Ecror to claim the country for himself, and victory is easier with priestess soldiers.
Her hand still on his mouth, Gennady licks her palm. She flinches away, hating and loving his laugh. Hating and loving when he takes a step closer, loosing a grin. She doesn’t need to look to know that Inessa must be watching, and Gennady’s trying to inspire jealousy of his own. “I was thinking maybe you could make a bouquet of wildflowers for me. The really rare ones that only a goddess daughter could harvest.”
“You think flowers are going to be the deciding factor in who Lord Henry chooses for his daughter?”
“I think it’ll be something Ephraim can’t replicate.” He takes her hands in his, spoiling another moment from her imaginings with this pitiful comparison. “Please?”
She’s a fool to nod, to think it won’t end in her own heart breaking, but she can’t deny him.
He plants a kiss on her cheek. “I couldn’t do this without you.”
And maybe that’s why she has such difficulty picking herself. Even though he won’t choose her in the long run, he chooses her in small moments. This is the closest she’ll get to being more than friends, and she’s delusional enough to think it’ll satisfy her desires.
