Like wingless perennial starlings, they laid on violence-carved runes reminiscing of diaphanous silk and delirious empires as cavalcading chariots surrounded their peninsula. Ëo, hidden in dust, watched while the young donkeys despaired. The enemy cavalry had travelled oceans and grew so tiresome they began to hate like men and ached to ruin all ever built on that refuge.
Their sacred refuge, where a long line of donkeys would shy away from darkness in an underground chamber to indulge in a balsam fountain that granted eternity’s delight. Covered by cyan shadows, every inhabitant would stain their blood with gulps of immortality. All but one, his ordinary-colored wool and roughened gray hooves distracting us from the obliviated truth glaring in his dark eyes. Ëo stopped drinking the preparation to become less than a god, which brought solitude.
The days fell through Ëo and what was left of him yearned for Layla. In a softer spring, she came looking for shelter. Her presence dulcified his every waking hour, turning his existence molten gold. Each sphinx-created mystery in his soul deciphered and translated on the black lines covering her white fur. After her departure, what was once a vast world revealed itself in Ëo’s own disarranged image. Such absence of tenderness could’ve made an old donkey go mad but instead, he waited. As beauty proved itself a chimera, he waited.
Ëo waited as the decades went by for he knew the next rapture would rot their teal and tear arteries hidden deep undersea. The years calcified the outlines of tragedy and out of habit he no longer feared. Under the dark veil of the night, Ëo’s tongue burned acerbic with remorse and when facing sunlight his four legs would tremble under the phantom pain of an inexistent freight.
When they knew the horses were coming, the donkeys could no longer sleep, a galloping in the distance would waver the very substructure of the cave, resounding on humid chamber walls and in the pulpous inside of their marrows. Ëo would sit and picture their enemies’ teeth shining on the battlefield. This sleepless vigil lasted a century.
When the horses flooded the chamber, faster than light, covering the floor in viscera and bone, Ëo, hidden in shadows, heard the smashing skulls, the falling bodies, the carnage, the ground giving in to the cavalry’s weight. Because the old donkey knew of a buried recess in the cave, he slipped into the night. Ëo knew he would die. Yet, purely by instinct, drowned in moonbeams, the donkey ran, and ran, until he saw the contour of a mountain.
Atop, Ëo saw a creature showing the way, leading the horses, shining through. An ordinary-colored animal, ripped in dark lines, with eyes much like his own. A fruitless being, a sterile mongrel born from forsaken tenderness, the decisiveness in its strut much like Layla’s. The donkey, old as the world, stood still as it approached. The wind sang silvery, the sky lit up with memory.
Ëo waited, as the zebroid prince, that abnormal being, born of love, came closer. A final bellow. Since a truer part of him wholly destroyed the remaining, all was forgiven. The primordial donkey, his heavy carcass trampled by the cavalry, conjoined to a cold earth, his harsh wool made velvety, soaked in blood. The body stayed intact for the vermin hesitated to eat his flesh.
Came the dawn, came the years, its army conquered the land and lived in excess until they dried up the holy fountain. Ëo’s son was a king, then a consul, then an emperor. It had many names, served every god, and as the flames rose to its striped fur, during its final moments, trapped in the depths of Alexandria, it remembered the hollow sound of its father’s heavy spirit hitting the ground.
