Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world, Heartworm/Irisa

[Nyxia]

my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things

She is not made of this fabric (stained pretty, bright colours; bejeweled and dripping with the woolen softness of eskimo kisses), of that they are all keenly aware. She can feel it, just as she had felt out of place and odd in that dark void in between – they are used to the company of each other and the things of her making. 

Nyxia is another thing, entirely, made of other stuff.

Made but not kept.

Her presence here rends the air around her mother like the toll of bells, splitting the peace and quiet. She is an intruder on these strange and distant shores. (She is something like a sickness – a mutation of a virus that had been here once before – that in any other case would have been swarmed by the leukocytes of her mind and destroyed before ever having been seen.)

But she has been here, in some way or another, before. (She cannot remember it, of course. Sometimes she dreams of something like it, when she lays her head down and her eyes drift shut. When she regresses back to that dark, suspended place.) Held inside, tight against another, for months of swaying and growing (growing around each other, a lattice of legs and necks). Made in a dream… a strange one, one that had so careless let him in…

(This place has a compromised immune system.)

“Irisa,” she looks a little younger than Nyxia does, because her mother likes her that way. “Heartworm. Nice to meet you.” She had never asked father about her mother. Hadn’t thought to. (Hadn’t been given a chance to.) What would he have said? (‘Because there are very few things in the whole of Beqanna scarier than me.’ He had said that once… had it been true of here as well?) How could he have explained any of it to his doe-eyed daughter?

It had been more important to just protect her and love her. He had found her, expelled from this place (two births – one after the other), alone and had been a dutiful father ever since. He is a good father. The lavender girl shifts uneasily, her eyes moving from Irisa’s as Heartworm speaks. She can feel the fear. She had known fear… Nyxia’s brow wrinkles and she blinks, “oh.” 

(Birds with beautiful, glittery, fanned tails perch and stare. Great, big cats with glowing stripes and friendly eyes turn. This world is wary.) Irisa speaks and Nyxia smiles, drawn back to her, but she cannot help but wonder aloud, “where should I be?”

She breathes and feels this place change; if she can be cast away once, so can she be cast out again.
(—she remembers sand under her hooves. Lightning cracking a beautiful, blue sky. A motionless body. Smoke in the air and… a tree, where she had waited. She had thought it had been father, but it hadn’t been him at all...) “W-why… am I… here?” she whispers, staring at Heartworm expectantly, her breathing coming faster and heavier. Panic.

(Her head hurts. The vision in her left eye blurs and wavers.)

and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.