endings and beginnings

[Nyxia]

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

Time comes back around.

Sometimes.

Sometimes, it is linear, like the paths between stars that map out a bounded constellation. She has felt this – this lineal undertow – many times since the moment she was plucked out of time and placed into a world just as strange as this one. Though even more hostile, she thinks, because at least this place is not, she has decided, a mother’s mind. 

(Slumber’s desire to bury her in a brine; the manticore’s hunger for more light in that darkness… these things were distant. Cold. Unfamiliar. 

That had been the cruelest cut of all – mother’s had been a violent excision, borne out of betrayal, twice-over.)

This place is, it seems to her, self-contained – as mother’s world had been. The in-betweens of vast space and the docks of here and now, sitting on stale lakes in their separate universes. The phantoms of choice belied by the singular navigational pull.

But times comes back around, now. 

Even here, without Time, the stark, blinding whiteness of this place untangles memories from her mind. Memories made in Time’s presence – set with a Before and After – so even without him, the moorings are still there. Real things. Not islands or in-betweens! But junctures of an existence that twists and weaves and is not linear, but wily! Devious! Odd, and at times, exquisitely sad.

A thing hewn in tandem, by her and Time.

‘We’re home?’ She remembers muttering through her thick, dry, blue-lipped mouth. She had been lying, as she is now, on her side – then, on the hard, packed dirt of a meadow; now, on the solid, unearthly plain of nothing-but-white. She had, as she does now, blinked up at a world of unkind brightness. It had been the sun, then. Now, it is simply the absence of anything to temper the blankness that surrounds her on all sides. Now, just as it had been then, the damaged side of her face is flat to the ground, hiding the hideous mess that had managed, haphazardly, to mend itself in her absence.

Unlike then, she knows she is not home. She cannot hear the soft flow of a river over its rocky bed. She cannot hear her mother fretting over the disintegration of her and Irisa’s island. She can neither hear the grass growing beneath her ear or smell it's earthy scent. She can only sense the sour vacancy of time. It takes but a moment for the calmness of familiarity to sink in. It is curious, like being force-fed recollections from a time in suspension, before her brain had tightened together and hardened. The pain, oozing from the marks left by the manticore's paws, presses against her temples – but still she tucks her hooves under her. Bending her shaky knees to test her own strength she raises her head from the ground, no longer a sterile womb, but a bloodied one.

Her golden eyes find the girl just before she speaks – drawn into her grace. “H-hel–” she tries to smile, it quavers on her lips, salty with sweat and tears. It is you! she thinks. It is hard to feel any sense of victory. Not while the girl is enclosed inside a magic that Nyxia cannot fathom – not while each inhale feels, as it had then, as if being drawn through iron lungs. ...we have met before. 

When she speaks again, raising her porcelain hands, she resets the cycle of Nyxia’s body – binding the skin, smoothing out the furrows.

The left side of her face remains a testament to Time; her body, the revelation of dawn and dusk in one breath.

She hauls herself to her feet, watching the images dance across the walls like so many cave paintings in motion, riding the slipstream of time in jubilation and banality. How strange, she thinks, to see it from this angle. She steps closer, watching them in awe – ‘most don’t make it this far,’ Nyxia turns her eyes to her and wonders if her time spent on stale islands and dark in-between had aided her adventure here. “I… simply keep moving, that is all,” she replies, softly. Her eyes follow those graceful, pale hands to the far-most wall, watching the shimmer of another doorframe, unhinging (she hopes) the walls between this world and her own.

‘You can take me from here.’

Her chest clenches. Memory comes again, this time with its anchor sunk deep in a place beyond the hands of any clock. She stares at the girl, her heart beginning to pound impossibly loud in her ears. Yes, she has been here before. Another rescue mission, in another world, dreamed-up by another creator – except, she supposes, Irisa had never asked to be taken. She had been – all three of them had been – expelled like a virus from the gut in one dry, horrid heave of mother’s subconscious. Her ears pin back, and all that the girl says thereafter is lost in a haze of nightmare,

(A world shudders. Quakes. Heaves.
Animals scream – they have lost their tongues, their languages. They are panicked!
They look at her with fierce, threatening eyes – they, like leukocytes of her mother’s mind closing in on her, a foreign body.

It collapses. Everything. In one terrifying, thunderous moment, she looks only for the many-coloured hints of her sister in the whirl of awakening. She feels the squeeze, as if being passed through the eye of a needle, and out into an uncertainty lorded over by dead planets—)

Her heart is not the native habitat of courage.
It is an unkind, barren place.

“I-I…” she frowns, stepping backward, tears had never stopped coming so she barely notices that hot trail down her throat. “I’m sorry.” She sobs, sucking in air.

(In the corner of her eyes, jeweled-toned panthers slip like shadows.
For some time after Beqanna reset itself, she swore she could hear them mock her day and night – ‘Father! Irisa!’ – with their toothy voices.)

She staggers towards the opening, unaware of the girl’s warning because, in her fear, she had chosen not to listen. Time’s wrath. Something she has felt only in the way it seems desperate to separate her from her family for eternity. Time had healed her body, as best it could, when she was stuck in transit. Time had given her friends. Time had taken them, too. Time had brought war – that war had brought death so close that her left eye had not managed to survive the proximity.

Time, they both know, is unavoidable.
Time’s wrath, at least, would be faced in a place whose physics and nature makes sense. Death, perhaps, might come. But death, she thinks, it a better fate than aimlessness.

“I am so ver-ry s-sorry,” she lingers, blinking down at the ground. Time had isolated her. Time had poisoned the memories of her girlhood – made them silly and sorrowful in equal measure. “I… I have s-seen this before.” Yet, she yearns for him – for the feeling of forward motion; for the caresses and the whips – but somewhere along the way, she lost her instinct to please him. Not to destabilize another world, to let loose the things that live in it – it takes over her mind like something that cannot be so easily shook: the instinct for survival.

“M-maybe, you are s-safer here,” a thought she had not given to Irisa, of course. “It is s-so cruel out there.” If she had screamed and wailed, it might have been easier. But the girl remains, as ever, quiet and melancholy, watching.

“I am... too scared,” it comes out heavy and the release brings no relief. “Goodbye,” she turns, does not look back, and passes through the door in defiance of Time.

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