05-06-2023, 02:23 PM
jamie
I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT
What does it feel like.
Does she rot? If he peered in at the meat of her, would it appear just as withered as the grass underfoot? There is some small thrill that snakes through his gut at the thought of it. (And he thinks briefly of the dead thing he’d summoned, the horror of it, how it staggers now between this world and the next.) He smiles then, the mouth dripping ink-black as he tilts that strange head and considers the question.
Theoretically, he knows what a rhetorical question is. But Jamie is nothing if not a literal creature, so he answers. “Suffering,” he tells her. Because, for him, that is what living has always been. From the earliest days of his youth, when the joints had ached and the breathing had been labored and he had slid between the shadows, frightened of the sun. When he had pulled the fog tightly around himself, just as he pulls it around them now. (He has aged and grown and accumulated power beyond his wildest dreams, certainly, but he is a small thing at heart. He is still that boy who’d found tremendous comfort in the darkness, in the pain of it all.)
He turns his focus then to the ghosts outside. He does not look at them, no, but delves into their frantic minds. Their thoughts always race, he has found. More often than not, they are plagued by panic. And then he glances back at her, this girl who has made an alliance with the ghosts.
He knows that she is not the only one with this gift, that there are others in Beqanna who commune with spirits. But she considers them friends, which is something else altogether. (Does he consider them friends, he whose magic is tethered to Death? No, not especially, certainly not in the way that she does.)
He wonders, were he anyone else, if they might try to destroy him for obscuring her from them. If they’d gnash their teeth in protest. “What do they tell you?” he asks then, voice low.
Does she rot? If he peered in at the meat of her, would it appear just as withered as the grass underfoot? There is some small thrill that snakes through his gut at the thought of it. (And he thinks briefly of the dead thing he’d summoned, the horror of it, how it staggers now between this world and the next.) He smiles then, the mouth dripping ink-black as he tilts that strange head and considers the question.
Theoretically, he knows what a rhetorical question is. But Jamie is nothing if not a literal creature, so he answers. “Suffering,” he tells her. Because, for him, that is what living has always been. From the earliest days of his youth, when the joints had ached and the breathing had been labored and he had slid between the shadows, frightened of the sun. When he had pulled the fog tightly around himself, just as he pulls it around them now. (He has aged and grown and accumulated power beyond his wildest dreams, certainly, but he is a small thing at heart. He is still that boy who’d found tremendous comfort in the darkness, in the pain of it all.)
He turns his focus then to the ghosts outside. He does not look at them, no, but delves into their frantic minds. Their thoughts always race, he has found. More often than not, they are plagued by panic. And then he glances back at her, this girl who has made an alliance with the ghosts.
He knows that she is not the only one with this gift, that there are others in Beqanna who commune with spirits. But she considers them friends, which is something else altogether. (Does he consider them friends, he whose magic is tethered to Death? No, not especially, certainly not in the way that she does.)
He wonders, were he anyone else, if they might try to destroy him for obscuring her from them. If they’d gnash their teeth in protest. “What do they tell you?” he asks then, voice low.
AND IT LEAVES ME COLD
@
Iris