looking for heaven found the devil in me; witching

[Witching]

She is a bird, tangled up in netting. She had never learned to be cautious. She had never learned to be prey – fleshy and bloody though she is, underneath… like mother… like father – so she never learnt to be safe. She learned the touch of Two and Three, noses and knees; the quiet intonations of their tongues against the walls of their mouths. The things that make her and Two mirrors and the ways her and Three were so similar despite him being the different one.

She learned Gravely and Reap down to the fine lines on their muzzle’s velvet. She learned the prints their frogs made in the mud, and so when they were detached from orbit, she hounded them ceaseless, pulled along by all the things she knows.

(Something flutters in her chest, like wings. Primordial and beseeching. There is something not right about the exposure of his guts and musculature – his bones praying in greenish rot that has a sickening glisten to it – she knows that, faintly. Vaguely. Her nostrils quiver and tighten, and her blood pressures the twitching nerves of her own healthy muscles with the impetus to run.)

But she never learned flight.

He says her name and her ears flick forward, and she can see smoke belching towards the sky and fire. Monsters and demons and magic, all over again. She smiles, though it is as false a smile as it gets. (She never learned to show these things easily – Two and Three just know, and so her face can only create contrived imitations of things others might understand.)

“Yes.”

She moves to be closer to him (her gut knotting in a million, unnerved quakes) to inspect the strange, tugging sinews and the flat, white cartilage.‘Do you know where mother is?’ she means to ask, before the earth jerks and she is tossed off balance.

Two. Three.

-----

She screams.

In anguish.

In rage.

Screams until blood spatters her lips and her throat feels horribly raw.

“GRAVELY!”

She continues down dark passages, away – far, far away – from Her.

“REAP!”

She crosses thresholds and births again through the tight, pulsing of a canal. Without Him.

“Gravely! Reap!” She is high above, in thin and insidious air. She gyrates and shivers, her lips dry and cracking. She feels the need for them squeeze her heart too tight and she falls to her knees, again and again (in bow to something awesome and demanding), scraping them bare and open. 

She does not feel her limitlessness leech from her body – replaced by a queer impersonation of it – only their absence, more sure than it had been the first time they were separated.

-----

Fury chases her down that mountain. 

And panic. 

Loss cramps her muscles as she twists and turns, sliding down on loose stone and dirt that threaten her purchase on the descent. Down, down. Like an avalanche of meat and wild, blind thoughts, she follows the many others who have tumbled from that peak to crack like birds’ eggs on its foot.

She screams. It ravages her larynx and comes out weak and miserable.

She gets no peace. Darkness does not peel off her like it does him, relieving him of a his prison (a cell, perhaps, that he has come to love?) of undead vestments. She is weighted and confused. By and large, she is unchanged, having simply been exchanged one eternity for another.

But the rest?

The thing she loves and needs so deeply?

Gone.

They are gone. Tossed haphazardly off into deepest, darkest space. Split apart by the violent course of spacestuff – a meteor come to fracture their little galaxy. One. When she passes the righteous and unkind gate of that mountain, where the air is easier but so unimaginably changed, she stops. Dead, blinking around her, breathing heavy as her lungs satisfy themselves with the readiness of this atmosphere. Two. Three. She blinks, light-headed and filly-footed, she stumbles forwards, into alien territory.

Stumbles and blinks until she finds the naked, unbroken chestnut. The muscles, now live wires and unexposed. Her dark eyes narrow and she remembers war and a monster hurtling itself towards her…. ‘Your father, the one who calls himself Rodrik, is not to be trusted.’ She moves towards him, her legs criss-crossing and unsteady, her knees battered and smeared, dark crimson and dirt. “Rodrik?” Witching considers his cleanliness and vitality, the brightness in his eyes. “Where did you get all that skin…?”

@[Rodrik] -- sorry this took so damn long, honestly, I have a weird feeling that it kind of intimidated me <3