And so you choose

[Nyxia]

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

Times is here.

He comes to her on two legs, and he is strange. 

Nyxia takes care not to look at him – looks at everything but him. At the long, dark, slippery tunnel of stone she fumbles down, like a newborn, following the far-off sound of that helpless cry. She explores the thick clumps of moss that clutter the rock like fractured, green continents in a dark, gray ocean.

She takes care not to look at him because he scares her.

He plays such unfair games.

“Where am I now?” she asks quietly, but it grows loud in the emptiness that surrounds them – infront and behind. It rattles off the smooth surface of this strange place he has brought her, this strange in-between (she has been here before. But before it was impossibly dark and out of his reach.) ‘Are you mothers?’ she thinks, but does not say. In her peripheral, she can see his hairlessness and those wide, feline eyes blinking at her. He is something like what mother might make, perhaps? They wander, astride, for some time (some time – you see, an incalculable amount of time! be is seconds or hours) until finally, he says something that stills her and draws those bright, golden eyes to his own piercing stare. “H-her?

Who is she?”

Time doesn’t listen.

Time pulls her ever towards.

He pulls her towards the threshold that consumes him in white fire, so bright that for a moment she stops and shutters her eyes against the sudden onrush of light. Her ears tip back and the overload of her senses buzzes like a million bumblebees invading a peaceful forest…. Until… 

Until the quietude of his absence falls over her body like a heavy, wet blanket. Like something she has felt before – loneliness? Because without him she is lost in the weeds between never and forever. Sadness? Because that loneliness breeds it aggressively; multiplies a hundredfold. It is a cancer that stops her from calling for them (‘father’ and ‘Irisa’) and leaves her dumb and dull.

And then the sound of water reaches her stony shore, and that is something. She follows it eagerly, as once she had followed colour, like a starved hound, out of that darkness and into that dream. Nyxia gawks at the glassy, turquoise water that expands ever outwards to the horizon, interrupted only by the fractured, green islands of here and there. And nothing more. She knows the way back is gone; she can feel it wither away at her back, cutting her off from the world ruled by time.

“There is nowhere to go,” she whispers, and a million tongues make themselves heard in every word. Bewilderment. Amazement. Some hope that maybe this is the plain on which she is reunited with those she has lost; some measure of sorrow, because she knows that simply is not so. She wanders the shoreline, watching crabs sidle away from her feet; she watches the tide come in and touch her toes, so briefly and gently, before retreating back – crabs in hand.

She watches the clean, wide sky ripple in the water as she wonders whether or not this place knows night. If it knows dusk or dawn. Or if it is stuck in a kind of permanence, lorded over by the lazy sun that guides her, steady, to what she begins to imagine will be nothing. Warmth, like welcoming arms, cloaks her and in this embrace, she becomes drowsy herself. She yawns, her golden eyes blinking serenely.

“Lay down,’ the soft, motherly voice comes from nowhere in particular.
“I can’t—ahhhh,” she yawns again, shaking her head slowly, dragging her feet.
“Of course you can… where are you going, anyway?”
Nyxia drags on, the questions knotting her mind, the heft of sleep weighting her tongue, “why,” she stops, blinking out across the still water, to the belching volcano and the lush jungle beyond, “I’m… I’m not sure…”
“Then… why go? Why not stay here?”
“I have to… find her…”
“Who?”
“Who knows,” Nyxia replies, soberly, slowly beginning the process of dropping to her knees for a nap.
“Then who cares.”

A sleep like no other takes her. Substantial and terrible, it is navigated, not by time, but by nothing, and so it has no beginning or end. It simply…. Is.

(For minutes or hours, she sleeps, and she dreams nothing.
She is thankful for that.)

“...mine!”

(It echoes in the nothingness. But it is so far away!
She strains to hear it.)

“...finders….”

Her lips twitch above the surface, her eyes rolling under her lids.

“KEEPERS!”

(Her sleep quakes and rattles, and forces her out.)

She sucks in air, but what comes is half water. It fills the back of her throat, stoppering her airway. Panic takes hold. She fumbles to her feet but she finds the unkind resistance of water making her legs heavy. The lavender mare opens her mouth to breathe! Scream! Cough! She can see, now, that the tide has (over some time) crept up around her body, hoping to drag her back with it, eventually. She gains her feet with much splashing and finally air forces itself from her starving lungs. The exhales that follow are damp sputters.

“DAMN!” the voice from nowhere in particular screams, much harsher than she remembers.

Faint rattling, like seashells clattering, fills her ears “...come! This way! quick!”
Nyxia’s eyes dart left and right, but she sees nothing. Still, the voices (for there is, she thinks, two – though, they are so closely intertwined as to be almost one) are bright and amiable, and she thinks she has them to thank for saving her. So she races after them, away from the anger that hangs over the first shore now, like a raincloud, and across the half-sunken sand bar. She follows the sounds of the shells in her ears and the faint, impish chittering and giggles until she reaches the opposite shore.

Slowly, memories return to her – how she got here; remembers that, in truth, she does not know why, yet. Everything – a lifetime and… a death, even – takes root again in her mind, and she is so distracted by the immensity of it, that she does not realize that she is not alone.

“...don’t sleep there…”
Her eyes snap up. In front of her stand two horses, almost entirely identical, except for the garb they wear, fashioned from seashells of all sorts fastened together by water weeds. They are young, perhaps only yearlings. They are lanky and wind-blown, both a dirty gray. Their hair is matted and hung with ceriths and prickly cockles.
“...never sleep there!” the second twin repeats, exasperated.
“I didn’t know,” Nyxia replies, earnestly, glancing back and forth between the two.
“...probably forgot. It’s what She does…”
“...ah, yes, you must have forgotten….”
“...never forget!”
“Well, I didn’t mean to but, I couldn’t help it.... Where am I? Can you tell me?”
The shellycoats look at each other for a long while, as if trying to get a story straight, and then in unison, “you’re here.”
Nyxia can tell, without having to be told, that is all the help these strange children will offer. “I… I’m looking for, a woman… I heard her screaming and somebody told me she is in danger. You don’t know where she might be? Did you hear any screaming?”
They look at each other again, saying nothing at all. And then, “...screaming! Oh course!
—I heard screaming, coming from there!” one of them motions to her rear, were the jungle grows, dense and dark.
“—I heard it over there!” he motions, exaggeratedly, to the looming, black volcano, jutting up towards the sky. They smile and nod, both, letting slip little giggles.

“That is no help at all!” she blurts, suddenly very angry. (Anger is not a thing she is used to tasting – it is bitter; it reminds her of dreams.) She huffs, brushing past the shellycoats, whose snickers fade away as she stomps towards the jungle, drawn by the familiarity in trees and roots and flowers. She is familiar, too, with the darkness there. 

It is cold and she finds she must walk ever so carefully here, but the richness of the understory is welcoming, even if it is not meant to be. The eyes that blink at her in that gloom do so on the periphery – they do so among the many that stayed with her after the expulsion from her mother’s world. She cannot tell the fact from fiction, so she cannot tell what threatens her. They are more like companions to her, even the ones that lick their chops. Whether because of full bellies, or because there is easier prey elsewhere, they do not touch her. 

They let her wander their home until she tumbles out the other side, finding herself, once again, blinking against a rush of light and at a battered, thatched hut sitting all alone.

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

i'm so sorry.
it's just under 1500. meets slumber and distraction in two shellycoats.