freedom hangs like heaven; etro

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife It had been an accident. This is the one comfort he has, the one he repeats when he cannot sleep at night as the relives what it had been like inside her mind. (Joy, but darker things too, shackles rising like snakes in the grass, a body prone on the earth, loss echoing in hallways.) (Flight, the sensation of it, different than the birds, different than anything he’d ever known.) He hadn’t meant to lose control. Hadn’t meant to take control at all, really, but her mind had been so sweet, at first. He doesn’t know how she is. If she even lived. He – they – were falling, then they weren’t. Then he was back in his own body, own mind, and he did not know where she was. (He thought he heard a scream, but he doesn’t know if it was real or imagined.) It had been an accident but that doesn’t mean he won’t carry his grief and guilt upon himself. He is sorry. He is always sorry. But he cannot reach out to anyone, lest he foul their mind as well. But there is one, who quiets him, whose queer magic smothers whatever curse has befallen him. He does not know if he can find her, but he knows her name: Etro, who was one poisoned by the place she called home, who spoke to him of dreams and an impossible sun. He is lucky. For once in his life, he is lucky. For he finds her, bay and beautiful, and with it the restless buzzing of his mind quiets and he is so grateful he wants to throw himself at her feet, worship her as a goddess. Perhaps she is. He is devout to her, in a strange way, devout to whatever powers she wields that quiet him the way they do. “Etro,” he says. He does not mean to make her name sound like a sob. sleaze cancer x garbage