Now I gotta make a decision and I don't really know which option to choose. I'm a big wreck, did you not get the news?

Can't go to sleep unless I leave the lights on.
You don't know how many fuckin' demons I know.

It's beautiful here. With the wide open plains and their golden grasses it almost reminds him of the first place he had truly called home. It's strange to him how coming here had felt almost perfect. For it was genuinely a place that was peaceful and out of the way of the rest of Beqanna. It was exactly what he had been searching, well no, waiting for. It was most definitely a place that was worth calling home, at least for now. For he couldn't guarantee his staying here for eternity. Always did the ways of life change and lead you in different directions...

But for now that doesn't matter. What matters is this is home. This is the place to be. To grow. To improve. It is who he needs to become that encourages this place as something most perfect. It is to his future self that sees it as a gem laying away in secret within all the rough edges. Sunday would be a perfect ruler. Her plans for this place were ideal, especially for those like him who just wanted something that was peaceful, where they didn't have to deal with politics or specific ranking systems. At least not for now.

It's the sudden caws of the birds overhead that pull him out of his rambling and repetitive thoughts. Slowly he looks up, his dark black eyes following the movements of birds wings as they drifted lazily in large circles. He wonders what it's like, to be a bird. Not a care in the world as they drift happily through the skies and bright puffy clouds. Is it possible that they try to live their lives the same way as the rest of them? And if they do, how do they still live so happy and carefree even with all the disappointment and pain? Is it possible they would one day come down and tell them to secrets to how to live at peace and happy for eternity?

Probably not. For nothing is ever that simple. If it were, they all would have figured it out a long time ago. In the bird's songs they would have heard the secrets and used them to their advantages. Then eventually a perfect life would have become boring for some or many and in response the trouble would begin, the revolutions, the mutinies, the wars. Because if history has taught us anything this is how it goes. Every. Single. Time. Nowhere was safe. Not forever. Which is why the slightest bit of worry sits in the back of his mind, waiting to claw it's way into the light so that it could push him back into the dark corners of the forest were it was quiet and safe from the many.

Slowly he looks down, back out across the plains, his eyes squeezing shut for a moment until the sun spots floating in his line of sight disappear. Opening his eyes he blinks once more before catching sight of her in the distance. Her bright lavender color sticks out easily amongst the plainz golden grasses. For a moment he watches her, unsure of whether or not approaching her one-on-one was something he was ready for as conversation had never been his strong suit. In a group he could hide behind the others, allowing them to speak, but when it was just him and another he was forced to be a constant participant.

Though before he knows it he is headed towards her, almost unwillingly. It is as though his body has decided for him, ignoring his thoughts of hesitation. The golden grasses tickle the sides of his legs and his underbelly as he strolls over the open plainz and when he finally reaches her he nods quietly, his shoulders rolling in a slight shrug. "Hey," it's most certainly not the best way to start, but he's trying.

my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things

She wanders as if in a dream. With an idle look in her eye; with slow, slumberous steps that have no sense of direction about them at all. That will never change. She is too far-gone. She has seen too much – she has been touched, too often, by things too far removed from reality, life, wakefulness and normalcy. Her companions are ghost-things – escapees from worlds that exist on different plains than this one.

They are air-fleshed and wind-voiced.

At one time or another (or, in no Time at all), she met them on their own ‘soil’ – dream-land or in-between. They had been dagger-clawed and flute-tongued and pastel-feathered! They had been bright, jocund and beautiful; they had been pernicious, suspicious and sad. They could, and did, touch her, speak to her, whisper amongst each other about her. She wonders what she must have looked like in their universes – like an alien, perhaps, like a thing that does not belong – air-fleshed and wind-voiced?

She has come to accept that this place, beautiful indeed, is real. Though the lines are blurred in a permanent sort of way, forever teasing the edges of some rift or another – or so it seems, as each step she feels cold and then hot and then cold again, her skin recalling the slippage between worlds on loop. But when she stops, as she does now her right eye blinking at the endless sea of yellow grass, the sun (the real one – whatever that means, though she can tell it is young and strong because she has met old, frail ones and has been to places without) touches her, and in that embrace she feels moored.

From afar, she watches him consider the birds. She has never done this, but in response she tilts her head and looks skyward, watching their dark figures hem the planet. She wonders none of the things he does – they do not elicit anything but a blink or two before returning her watery gaze to him. (They might have, once, when she was a girl and her mind was not fractured as it is today.) 

When he wades through the grass, lifting the softest song of rustling and muffled footsteps below, she does not curl and quake in fear – (she might, if she knew what he could be, but she does not and it means nothing for now) – she turns her head right, so that he comes to her clearly, not in the blind spot that is the cratered and puckered left. 

“Tannor?” she inquires, her voice as steady as when she was a girl, not the weepy stammer that had become her timbre in recent years. “That’s it, right? Nyxia,” she supposes, after all of it, that is still true, “you suppose this place is real, right?” She yearns to reach out and touch him, as she touches and is touched by the grass around her, seeking more earthen ropes to grip onto.

More assurances that she has not fallen down a rabbit hole, again.

and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.