hold my hand, it's a long way down to the bottom of the river
At first there had only been the voices of her family, of her twin, her other half, and of their parents. These voices, they should have just been thoughts, but they had echoed in her mind just the same as the gurgling river beside which they had been born and the cries from the birds flecked across a pale dawn sky. These thoughts, these three perfect voices, they had fit together like puzzle pieces in her head, they hadn’t fought for space, hadn’t pushed away her own voice to make room for theirs. They just fit. Warm and radiant and everything that was right in a world she had known for five short seconds.
And then, like the ripples cast from a stone dropped in a puddle, her reach expanded and her mind imploded. Suddenly there had been too many voices, too many thoughts, an impossible weight for a child who had known only the silence of the womb, of feelings without the echo of thought to burden them. It was like standing in the bottom of a valley, each new mind a splash of water until suddenly she was buried beneath the ocean and the weight was crushing her.
But father had taught her how to mute the world, how to erase one voice at a time until only a handful remained and her mind didn’t ache and tremble and shatter to dust. It had taken months of practicing, months of trying and failing and endless frustration, days fractured with headaches and ruinous secrets she never should have known. But weeks passed and the headaches faded, the secrets ebbed with the tide as the thoughts returned to their vast ocean blue.
Suddenly it was easy.
And as she stood now at the center of the meadow with her eyes closed and a look of furrowed concentration etched over the hollows of her delicate brown face, she realized how much she loved the voices echoing in her thoughts. It was easier now, so much easier, and she knew how to crack a door enough to see inside, to see dark or light or the gray of in-between, knew enough to slam a door when there was only shadow inside. But as she waded through this ocean, floating on the waves instead of drowning in the currents, she felt one mind louder than the rest. Her eyes flew open and her face turned like a flower to the sun as she tried to match the mind to a face. As soon as she saw him, she knew. There was no need to fall back into his thoughts, and oh - she knew she shouldn’t by the hungry shadows waiting there for her.
But she did anyway.
It was chaos in his head though, thoughts overlapping, repeating, ending before they finished. She dug a little deeper and suddenly there was a word waiting for her, a name and another. Etro. Sleaze. It took a moment to realize she was being careless, that he would absolutely have noticed her sorting through the files of his mind, picking at the threads of his thoughts. She pulled back hard, her eyes wide and wild and bright when they landed on his.
Isle
