jamie
02-10-2024, 09:02 PM
jamie
The sea-thing staggers, loses its balance, and the shadow-thing merely tilts its strange head and watches. The reaper does not spring to her aid or ask if she’s all right, he simply studies and remembers.
(Remembers the years he had spent a cripple, turning his face from the light, grimacing against the ache in his joints. Remembers how he’d pulled the fog around him and slept. For days at a time, he’d slept! He knows exactly all the ways a body can betray you and none of them nudge him toward empathy.)
The grin does not fade so much as the shadow-thing merely closes its mouth when the sea-thing speaks. So she is not familiar with the Chamber, had not meant for it to be the place where she crawled out of the sea.
“Shame,” he muses, the breath still so much like a death rattle. It is a strange thing for her to ask him, he thinks, though the answer is perhaps not as simple as it should be. (How long has it been now? He’s uncertain as time has a habit of bending away from memory. And how does his physical presence compare to the fact that his allegiance to the Chamber spans generations. Were he a romantic, he might have been drawn to the place simply because it had been the setting of his parents’ love story. Alas, he is not a romantic, he has simply always been desperate to prove his worth to his mother and she had scarcely loved anything so much as she’d loved the Chamber.)
There is no sense explaining this to a stranger, though.
“I’ve lost track,” he murmurs then, rolling a dark shoulder in a kind of shrug. He glances beyond her to the sea.
“What were you looking for, if not the Chamber?”
(Remembers the years he had spent a cripple, turning his face from the light, grimacing against the ache in his joints. Remembers how he’d pulled the fog around him and slept. For days at a time, he’d slept! He knows exactly all the ways a body can betray you and none of them nudge him toward empathy.)
The grin does not fade so much as the shadow-thing merely closes its mouth when the sea-thing speaks. So she is not familiar with the Chamber, had not meant for it to be the place where she crawled out of the sea.
“Shame,” he muses, the breath still so much like a death rattle. It is a strange thing for her to ask him, he thinks, though the answer is perhaps not as simple as it should be. (How long has it been now? He’s uncertain as time has a habit of bending away from memory. And how does his physical presence compare to the fact that his allegiance to the Chamber spans generations. Were he a romantic, he might have been drawn to the place simply because it had been the setting of his parents’ love story. Alas, he is not a romantic, he has simply always been desperate to prove his worth to his mother and she had scarcely loved anything so much as she’d loved the Chamber.)
There is no sense explaining this to a stranger, though.
“I’ve lost track,” he murmurs then, rolling a dark shoulder in a kind of shrug. He glances beyond her to the sea.
“What were you looking for, if not the Chamber?”
so darkness i became
