drunk and driven by a devil's hunger; any

[Nyxia]

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

“No no no,” she whispers, her pulse thudding loudly in her ears. She reels back a step, slow and delicate despite her size. It had been a mistake to pursue his nature; a dangerous dose of curiosity to invite him to her from the Periphery—real or dreamed-of, he breathes and he stalks and he is coming. He is coming in a way she knows is unstoppable and inescapable.

She has met both of these things; she has been intimate with both forces, pressing hard on either side until she is paper-thin and weightless, and fails to exist. She waits, then (for minutes or days), for a wind to come along and push her further on her endless, unstoppable and inescapable search for them—

‘father, sister’

(Anyone?)

Her chest clenches as he speaks—her tongue, she understands it instantly. Not in the slow-burning, building way the nature of the manticore’s words had made themselves known through his song, crowding her hearing with meaning. Her ears flick forwards (excitation over the prospect of contact, finally)—but her body reacts instinctively, healing back from him again, her golden eye avoiding his own piecing green and the hulking, strange body he lives within.

She keeps him in the periphery, tucked safely away to her right side and good (only) eye.

He answers her thoughts—he denies being one of mother’s escapees; he says he is not from those barren, still, timeless universes, but still he rattles the cage of her anemic sanity, slipping in and out with ease. “Y-you must be,” she mutters back, stepping away from the breath that bellows from his toothy maw, “you m-must be. H-ho-w did y-you...” That is safer, she reminds herself. Something she can pass by like an illusion painted vividly. None of them have ever laid a claw, hook, or hand on her—at least, not after resurfacing here.

(Here. Here is home.
Home is real.)

When he shifts forms, however, that golden eye flicks to him, wide and wet with new tears, facing him fully, her jagged, broken and poorly healed left side peeking around dumbly. The colours pull at her throat and guts, she sniffs, searching his soft hair and antlers for the visible signs that he has been severed and rearranged—‘I’m sorry,’ she almost whispers, before he asks her that question.

Her brows, one smooth and one crooked, come together, “I-I don’t d-dream,” she lies, her words quavering. She dreams endlessly. She walks in dreams. She wakes and drifts in dreams. She rents dreams in two, devouring whole words like some apocalyptic colossus. “Go back,” she insists softly, turning her eye away again. Back to the Periphery. She deserves his haunting—all of them.

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