It isn’t a secret that death in this world was subjective.
The majority would argue that the beach was the end - that the shorelines, littered with bones and bodies alike, rotten with the stench of decay, was the last place for almost everyone; that there was no coming back from there. Elektrum knows better.
Because he’d seen his mother die, over and over and over again.
Once he’d watched as Cordis pulled lightning from her bones to breathe life back into Spyndle’s eviscerated body, watched the pieces of her reassemble even when there were too many of them to count. Once he’d watched her let the water into her lungs, and when Cordis came (because she always did; a symptom of her sickness) he’d watched her take her heart and keep it. He’d followed her once, through time and space, to the place beneath the willow where her bones grew algae in the river water.
He knew then that there was more.
And in the beginning he had come a thousand times. He looked for her always - at first thinking he would bring her home, that it would be enough to fix things, that she wouldn’t just escape into death again. As days turned to weeks turned to years, however, his mind had started to waver. He wanted to hurt her like she’d hurt them. Another secret, another pulsating tumor he keeps close to his breast that rots away behind his ribs.
It isn’t beautiful like the last world. There is no lilac sky, or glass lake. There are no seasons, either, and so the winter falls away like petals on wildflowers only to be replaced with nothing but gray, and dust, and mist. There is a moon, but it’s low and heavy and foreboding rather than gentle.It feels like Jupiter, like the gravity is strong enough to liquify their bones and melt their bodies into puddles - like they are being pulled into the earth, and for the afterlife, there are a thousand different reasons why that might make perfect sense. This world is a tomb, and it keeps its bodies, its souls, close.
You can feel it in the heaviness in the air.
You can hear it in the hushed silence.
No, he is no stranger to this world, but the ache of it still steals the breath from his lungs at first. The skin along his back rolls and prickles, and for a moment, he forgets Lepis, forgets the earned ‘lesson’ he is teaching her about betrayal. Instead his eyes skirt through the trees and into the horizon to look for her, an instinct he cannot seem to shake despite any misgivings that he harbours.
“Am I dead?” She tilts her head in a way that softens his resolve for a moment. He parts his lips to assure her that he is not a murderer, but catches himself.
“Almost,” is what he says instead, and wistfully.
“No one living would find you here, at least.”
It’s a threat, perhaps; another flash of pearly whites to show her what he is capable of when he isn’t catered to, and one that he delivers with suddenly vacuous eyes. His body is straight and rigid despite the gravity, and there is nothing soft left about him now.
And then, because his ego gets the better of him (as was often the case):
“Do you like it?”
ELEKTRUM
how time twines around your neck,
@[Lepis]