you're only as sick as your secrets

[Narcisus]

Parry, thrust, lean back and guard. Strike, avoid, turn on the inside heel and slash.

Some fight with actions.
This mare and I fight with magic.

Every time she resists I’m left trying to close an opening. Her head lifts and I have to concentrate on making it stay put. Her mouth twists into a smile and I have to be the one to let go of an atom and cling to another. I’m hardly expending myself - she’s not worth the effort of ascending from this body - but damn is she beginning to infuriate me with her constant wriggling. And I try and try some more to keep the strings together, to puppet her just right, but she’s not one to be tied down, not this horse. She’s tangling them and I find myself unable to unravel them.

If she tests me, I might unravel myself.

But we're so damned alike, so bull-headed it almost makes me laugh to feel the control slipping, slipping, falling out of the invisible grasp. I’m spread thin and she knows it. The bonds between us (weren’t they beautiful? Didn’t I show her kindness in a world so dark and dreary?) snap of their own accord, powerless against the distraction of her own subtle, magical influence. An influence that builds like floodwaters breaching the shoreline, spilling out of her thoughts and into my mind until my pupils shrink and my head is shaking, trembling, locked and quivering as if it might explode.

There inside of me is a new world blooming.

Her world, I see.
Destruction wrought by chaos, fire licking its way across the forest with hungry tongues of yellow-ochre light. An entity I have never seen before but somehow familiarly striking - risen above the peons and the land like a dark god, calling forth inconceivable power to shape the territory to its will.
All these things and more, hammering themselves into my mind but we’re so damned alike, the two of us. So damned wrong. So I’m surprised when reality pierces the false images, when my mouth pops open and a strangled laugh works its way up and out into the quiet between us. These things that make her happy… well they bring delight to me as well. The sheer force of her feelings behind the pictures is enough to keep me steadfast, though I long to disappear into them forever. My legs are fighting the urge to run, run into their wicked embrace and find the happiness she’s found for herself. They are terribly, awfully, wonderfully beautiful. I could cry, I think.

But that’s not what I want. I want her to least expect it when it comes: when I choose to strike.

I want her to think she’s got me, that my head’s drooping from exhaustion and my wings are spreading open from their own weight, not by my design. Again and again, the delightful horror flashes through my mind, a loop that I think I can turn into a loophole. If I wait for the cycle to start again, let her play those pretty pictures in my head once or twice more then they’ll lose a bit of their luster, perhaps. They are, after all, only pictures of what once was or what might’ve been - flat, false things conjured by her and she is just a mare. A silly little mare. A silly mare who makes me feel like I have never felt before.

The dark god raises his incomprehensible eyes and I know what comes next.
I lunge.

She can’t trap my physical form. She can’t, can she? She can’t stop the way my wings flare or how I push off, head low and tucked to my chest like a battering ram. She’s only shown me what I’ve dreamed to see and though I should be thankful, I want her to know that I will never be cowed by improbable fantasies. I will root myself in the present even if her images play across my vision. I will make my own way, hers be damned. I am not like the others, nor will I ever be.

Narcisus

@[Aela] no, you have a novel.