she's still out there and the chasm grows; any

[irisa]

and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love

“Lonely, yes,” she agrees, but the loneliness isn’t so much what bothers her. She is used to loneliness, it has been a near-constant companion since she left her mother, broken only by brief meetings with strangers whose paths she had not crossed again – save for him. A sole connection in the loneliness, but this is not something she shares, as it is a weighty thing, and she knows he bears enough.
“It’s not mine, though,” she says, “I come here, and it is as mother left it. And I think she’ll return, and she doesn’t. If I change things – break them, mostly – they’re the same when I come back. I don’t know how to change it. Or how to make my own kingdom.”
She doesn’t know if that’s what her wants. She knows the lure of the dreamworld, where one can be a god – or a wolf – and she knows how it drove mother to madness. Why suffer at all in the waking world when a dream kingdom waits?
It’s tempting, and dangerous – a drug, bright and bursting on the tongue. Perhaps it is for the best that she does not know how to build her own world, only to inhabit this one.

“Of course,” she says, warmed by his gratefulness, by the fact she has been able to give him something, “anytime you wish.”

Irisa

tarnished x heartworm