[private] you were a shadow, laura pony

[miseria]

miseria

Here, here, here, the river says.
Even beneath the ice, she can hear it murmur. 

And she goes because these are the things that speak to her: the things of death, the things of ruin. She goes and she does not pause at the river’s edge. The ice does not deter her because you cannot kill that which is already dead. You cannot stop a heart that does not beat. You cannot arrest lungs that do not draw breath. 

The ice splinters beneath her feet because the reaper constructed her something already half-grown. (He had found the discarded things and pieced her back together. Everything different. Nothing fit together quite right.) She is not an adult but she is not a child either. Rather she is something caught between the two.

The ice splinters and then falls apart completely, plunging her into the water. But the cold cannot touch her. She is already dead. (But she is not altogether dead, is she? No, because he had dredged her up out of the muck and the mire, dragged her out of the Afterlife and set her loose on the world of the living. How strange it is to be something that is not quite either. But she is a study in the in-between.)

The water eats at the flesh and she plunges her mouth beneath the surface, swallowing. Because she does not remember what it means to be a thing that needs water to survive, a thing whose stomach cramps with hunger. How strange it is to be alive.

But the water merely slides down her throat. The water does not mean anything at all. It merely pools in her gut, where it will stay. Forever, perhaps. 

Forever, forever.

@laura

[aldous]

in your ribs, I see more than bones; something lost I had long ago

Aldous is a boy caught in the season before adulthood.

He is awkward in his body, all long limbs and short hair. He is lengthening but has not quite lost the softness of youth, his face still rounded in places where someday it will be all hard angles and planes. He is a thing born from affection, but not quite love—or, if it is, a poisoned version of it. He is the best and the worst of his parents, carved from their ambition and their curiosity and their greed.

He is cruel and he is curious.

Afraid and ready to cut his teeth on this world.

He watches from the bank as the thing that is not a filly and not yet a mare walks across the ice and then crashes through it. He lifts his head up higher and peers out, his dark blue eyes blinking closed as equine and opening as draconic, the vision sharpening. She is built odd, alien in nature, her body too thin and severe to be alive and yet clearly animated. His heart skips with something like fear, something like wonder, but he does not move from his perching spot. Instead his short tail flicks and he cocks a leg.

Should he save her, he wonders, but he does not move.

The fire dances around his face and he tilts it to the side.

Should he at least try, he thinks, but still, he remains still.

It is only when she surfaces and begins to drink that he moves at all, peeling away from the frozen ground to come closer to where the water would meet it were the ice not holding it back.

“What are you?” he calls, uncouth in his forwardness.

aldous

@miseria

[miseria]

miseria

She is a dead girl drowning when she hears him.
(What would happen if she were to submerge her head and draw in a long breath? Would she cough up the frigid water or would it simply settle in her lungs the same way it has settled in her gut?)

She lifts her head and turns to look at him. Him, there on solid ground. Him, unapologetic in the way he has asked what she is.

She grins. She grins and the red eyes flash as she wades through the water, pushes her way through the ice floe so that it breaks apart, shredding the flesh as she passes. But the blood is thick as mud as it springs forth from the wounds, settling on the surface instead of dripping down her legs, her sides.

She grins and there is something maniacal in it. She struggles up out of the water, scrambling when her feet slip on ice. But she never looks away from his face, even as slips. Her focus is singular and it is shackled to the boy on the shore.

“I?” she asks, head tilted. “Am I?”

Finally, she stops and she stands only a few feet from him as she calls upon her magic. 
(She had been all-powerful once, before he had dredged her up out of Hell and set her feet on solid ground. There had been so few things she could not do there in the underworld.)

But the magic is faulty here, surrounded by living things. So when she tries to show him what she is, the image is weak. It flickers, faded at its edges. But she wears it still, a reflection of his face cast upon her own countenance. It is his face, undoubtedly, but there is something grotesque in it, something twisted.

“I am you,” she tells him, still projecting his death mask back at him. 

@aldous