how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?
There is a piece of him that is a honing beacon for her—that returns the call of her gravity. He can feel it, like a hook in the very center of him that drags him forward toward her. That calls him into the deepest parts of the shadows where the world around them shifts and drags and pulls them closer to the nightmare that is this reality. His leg screams in agony as he goes, the muscles knitting together, the flesh pulling at places where it was stretched too tight, but he doesn’t stop. In some ways, he cannot stop.
For minutes, there’s nothing but the whistling screams of the wind around them.
There is the fingers of it that claw at his face, bringing tears to his eyes, a dryness to his mouth.
He wants to stop, wants to fall to his battered knees and quit, but she’s here.
He knows it.
The shadows morph around him again, and he feels something brush against him—something that nearly steals the breath from his lungs. He shouts out as claws sink into him, gouging his flesh, and he stumbles forward, nearly losing his balance. His vision doubles and then blurs as something in him changes. Something stolen, something replaced. It leaves him off balance, disoriented, and he takes two steps to the side, blindly falling forward through the broken trees. When he stumbles against her, it feels like fate.
Or, it would, if he had his right mind to him.
Pain explodes in his chest as the blood stains his haunches. His mind nearly cleaves in two as the new power surges through his veins. “Linnea,” he whispers as he presses his mouth to her wooden jaw, like a prayer, a whisper of hope, before the world shifts under his feet and his new gift tears through him.
Another cry as he brings her still, cold body to him and then silence as reality shreds.
He shudders, his throat aching, when it stills again.
He feels the warmth first.
The touch of sunlight against his back. Confused, he pulls back from her, blinking into the light, the sound of spring suddenly coming into perfect clarity. “Linnea,” this time her name a question as he takes a step into the forest of their youth, a place where they had met so many times in the before.
The world reversed, time snapped in half, and he can only blink into the light.
Words once again stolen.
nikolaus
if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
( for all you know, for all you’ve known )
@[linnea]