[open] once upon a different life, any

[Selaphiel]

these days i don’t pray when i close my eyes—

There is no place from the stench of death, but this place reeks so terribly of it that he can hardly breathe around it.

It is a place laid to waste.
It is a place all full of wreckage.

If he could, he would press his mouth to the earth and heal it. He would say a prayer for the souls lost here. But he cannot heal this earth and he no longer knows how to pray.

The grass is sparse, dead, and his heart clenches like a fist as he drifts across the landscape.

He will leave no mark here, this angel crafted from ice. This place will not remember him, though he will come to visit it often in his dreams. If he turned all of the devastation within him into a place, certainly it would resemble this. A land of ruin, marked by a chaos long since passed.

He draws in a long breath, remembering the way the big cat had sunk its teeth into his throat. How the ice had rushed to heal him so quickly that it didn’t even scar. 

(Why? Why does he think of this as he drifts across the plain? 
Why does he remember his own death?)

The water rises, hungry, and he watches a long moment before turning from it again. Turning to study the ruins. There had been a civilization here once, he thinks, and he wonders what it was that destroyed them. 

—I just bite my tongue a bit harder

[keyna]

Keyna

how can we wake without question when all of the world is burning?

He had promised that he would remember her.

Promised that he would remember her name.

It wasn’t a lot, but she had carried that with her. Carried that promise deep in her chest when they had finally parted ways. She remembered how serious his face had looked when he had made that promise and how she had wanted to cry from relief. How she had wanted to fall to her knees and thank him, and how the only thing keeping her from doing so was the thought that he would have no idea why.

No idea why such a thing meant so much to her.

Why it would matter that she would be remembered at all.

But it does and she holds onto it. As she wanders. As she feels herself grow invisible again, her steps becoming less sporadic and taking her further and further to the outskirts of Beqanna. How it had felt to have the world ripped away from her and to be left adrift, adrift, adrift (she was still, she thinks).

It was only when the world shook and she found herself back amongst the living that she shakes the dust from her and clears the film from her eyes. Ice grows in sporadic, protective patterns down her back and across her chest, and she barely notices. She just turns her purple eyes to the source of it and walks.

Her footprints leave frozen marks behind her and she doesn’t stop moving.

Not until she comes to this place of death and feels that surge of relief to see him standing there.

“I am not surprised to find you here,” is all she says when she walks up alongside him, her mouth a grim slash across her face. “The whole place reeks of death,” she notes, and if she sends a surge of her relief at seeing him down that connection between the two of them, she does not notice. She never does.

@Selaphiel