02-22-2022, 11:19 PM
Ryatah
WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU
IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU
She thinks she is getting better, but it is difficult to say when her baseline for better had never been good to begin with.
Her mind has always been a tangled thing, with a moral compass that knew exactly where north was but always ignored it. And her heart has always been prone to stumbling—tripping down every wrong path even when the right one was lit up like a flame in the dark and stretched before her. She has been her own demise time and time again, learning how to crash until she could burn in just the right way.
She has been broken for as long as she can remember, but the void had decimated her.
It had taken her concept of reality and demolished it, leaving behind a mind too addled to make sense of anything she saw in front of her. There is a part of her that still does not know if Carnage appearing in the void with Agetta had been real. He had felt real—the bruise left behind on her shoulder had ached in a way that she doesn’t think her mind could conjure. But had anything that transpired after that been real, or had it just been her mind’s desperate attempt to rescue her from even more certain insanity?
She doesn’t know, and even as her mind began to clear and everything felt less slippery that was still one thing that remained beyond her grasp, shrouded in a fog that never cleared. The more she tried to examine the legitimacy of the memory the further away it slipped, until she could no longer bear to look at it at all.
But she knew now, at least, that everything she sees is real. She looks at Atrox and does not have to touch him to be reassured of it, knows that he is not going to disappear when she blinks, that she does not have to hold him constantly in her sight. She knew now with certainty that he is not like the illusions that had toyed with her in the void, that he will be there when she falls asleep and still be there again when daylight finds them.
Hyaline is still the only place that felt safe, even if it was a false safety—nowhere was ever truly safe. She allows this white lie to herself, though, just so that she might be able to trick herself into a sense of normalcy. She does not wander as she might have once before, but she does venture away from the area of the mountain kingdom that had always been considered hers and Atrox’s. She follows the familiar paths to the lake, the ones that wind through the pine forests and across the rugged hillsides that slope down toward the crystalline lake. Sometimes she thinks she catches a flash of iridescent blue from the corner of her eye, and though it causes her chest to tighten and anxiety to gather in the center of it, she presses on.
When she first sets eyes on the unfamiliar stallion at the shoreline, her steps stutter to a halt.
Brightly lit and showering stardust from her wings, it would take only the barest tilt of his head to catch sight of her. He is too focused on the rocks on the ground to notice her, though, and she watches with a curious tilt of her own head as he picks one up in his mouth. With light steps she continues forward, her dark eyes brightening with unfettered amusement when he turns towards her and drops the rock from his mouth. “Then I won’t tell you that it looked pretty weird.” With her lips pulled into a small smile it’s clear that she is only teasing—she isn’t really one to be casting any kind of judgment. “So, what were you doing with a rock in your mouth since it wasn’t what it looked like and therefore not weird?”
Her mind has always been a tangled thing, with a moral compass that knew exactly where north was but always ignored it. And her heart has always been prone to stumbling—tripping down every wrong path even when the right one was lit up like a flame in the dark and stretched before her. She has been her own demise time and time again, learning how to crash until she could burn in just the right way.
She has been broken for as long as she can remember, but the void had decimated her.
It had taken her concept of reality and demolished it, leaving behind a mind too addled to make sense of anything she saw in front of her. There is a part of her that still does not know if Carnage appearing in the void with Agetta had been real. He had felt real—the bruise left behind on her shoulder had ached in a way that she doesn’t think her mind could conjure. But had anything that transpired after that been real, or had it just been her mind’s desperate attempt to rescue her from even more certain insanity?
She doesn’t know, and even as her mind began to clear and everything felt less slippery that was still one thing that remained beyond her grasp, shrouded in a fog that never cleared. The more she tried to examine the legitimacy of the memory the further away it slipped, until she could no longer bear to look at it at all.
But she knew now, at least, that everything she sees is real. She looks at Atrox and does not have to touch him to be reassured of it, knows that he is not going to disappear when she blinks, that she does not have to hold him constantly in her sight. She knew now with certainty that he is not like the illusions that had toyed with her in the void, that he will be there when she falls asleep and still be there again when daylight finds them.
Hyaline is still the only place that felt safe, even if it was a false safety—nowhere was ever truly safe. She allows this white lie to herself, though, just so that she might be able to trick herself into a sense of normalcy. She does not wander as she might have once before, but she does venture away from the area of the mountain kingdom that had always been considered hers and Atrox’s. She follows the familiar paths to the lake, the ones that wind through the pine forests and across the rugged hillsides that slope down toward the crystalline lake. Sometimes she thinks she catches a flash of iridescent blue from the corner of her eye, and though it causes her chest to tighten and anxiety to gather in the center of it, she presses on.
When she first sets eyes on the unfamiliar stallion at the shoreline, her steps stutter to a halt.
Brightly lit and showering stardust from her wings, it would take only the barest tilt of his head to catch sight of her. He is too focused on the rocks on the ground to notice her, though, and she watches with a curious tilt of her own head as he picks one up in his mouth. With light steps she continues forward, her dark eyes brightening with unfettered amusement when he turns towards her and drops the rock from his mouth. “Then I won’t tell you that it looked pretty weird.” With her lips pulled into a small smile it’s clear that she is only teasing—she isn’t really one to be casting any kind of judgment. “So, what were you doing with a rock in your mouth since it wasn’t what it looked like and therefore not weird?”
AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH —
BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE