‘Where am I?’ so much more often than not, because the places she has been and the places she is going have no names. They are old stale worlds with low, red moons; or they are new, brilliant ones with buoyant, rowdy suns.
They are places without maps and places without Time.
They are places in, and out of, the universe.
They are extinct and they are dormant.
They hold jubilant pastel castles ruled over by toothed beast-nature and shuttered, unembellished monasteries full of tall-legged seabirds bent low in prayer.
And they are worlds full of golden grasses grown tall by a nourishing earth; golden sands bent into pretty patterns by a reckless wind. They are lush forests, full of the yips, hoots and yowls of by-gone friends. They are ‘home’ and they are faraway from it; behind and before slips of spacey fabric, torn through by blood or playful ritual, by need and by adventure.
She knows not where she is, anymore, nor why she goes. It is not that she has given up, it is that she has forgotten – those invocations, ‘father’ and ‘Irisa’, had died on her tongue somewhere between worlds. So Nyxia walks, away from reaped golden grasses and promises, onward into the hall of close, frosted evergreens and naked birches.
“Here,” she sighs softly, stopping to lean against a dead-cold trunk, “here I am.” ‘Home’, she hears faintly like a warming breath cupping both side of her asymmetric head. Below the ice and snow, glittering prettily in the early sun, lay yellowed windflower, abeyant to the winter but ready to grow again in the thaw.
Tarnished x Heartworm
you give me something to think about that's not the shit in my head. He should know of time and space. He had spent years in it, existing but not. He can’t remember. Doesn’t recall the life he had once lived on earth. Doesn’t remember looking down on those below, longing to feel again. The great escape was now only just a dream, one he doesn’t remember as being real. It blurs into the back of his mind, fading more every day. He had been to another world but doesn’t remember it. Just as he doesn’t remember this one.
He wanders for lack of anything else to do. There are no stories in the places he walks, it simply passes the time. He discovers new faces, sees new things. It helps make the minutes pass by, helps him not think of Nocturnal. Where she was hiding herself on the Beach somewhere. Away from him, away from them all except perhaps the annoying lighting boy she had managed to miraculously give birth to.
A soft voice to his right as he passes through the trees. A faint whisper that he only hears because the woods are so silent, snow muffling voices and steps. A dark ear swivels before his red eyes find her. A lovely shade of purple, it reminds him of the lupins that grow in the spring. But where had he seen those before? He can’t recall. Home she says, full of affection.
While he’s not so familiar with this world he has been spat into, he is aware that most would not call the forest home. That their were kingdoms that one aligned themselves to, served and fought for. Loved, called home. Not the common lands. Then again he doesn’t belong in Nerine, he doesn’t really have a home himself. ”Welcome back.” He greets her solemnly as his muscular mahogany figure moves closer to her.
no crosses count i want to do it again
Here, indeed.
Home, indeed!
Here and home, where father browbeat tawny whitetails into letting her suckle by their fawn’s sides; from whom she had learned the high and careful step that makes her more graceful than her size should allow. Where she had made friends with red-pelted foxes, mimicking their chortling with her herbivore’s lips. Here, where she nestled in her babe-crib of windflower and ground-vines, watching spider’s webs shimmer in morning’s slanted sun.
How long ago was that?
So long ago.
A lifetime ago. A death ago. A dream ago. Worlds and worlds ago. “Hmm?” she tones soft and absently, turning her head—half the golden-eyed and high-cheeked loveliness made possibly by brutal intrusion, half the skewed and bludgeoned work of some Picasso, eyeless and ugly—to find him.
Stranger.
But then, what is left but strangeness? Geometric and law-abiding space, colonized by beasts of unknown wilds. She cannot tell one from the other—native and colonizer—but now she craves them all, no matter. Needy for closeness and the nosiness of mouths to break the stagnant quiet, she had breached the divide that once kept them all at her periphery—clasping necks with vermillion-scaled wyverns; touching ears with jackalopes as black as the universe.
His body smells of some places she has been—here, to be sure. Perhaps places in between, places neither of them can recall. He looks solid, lacking the airy way those specters pass through her own flesh. Substantial. Male. ‘Welcome back,’ he says and she dips her head, blinking at him, tears gathering along the single lash-line left. “Where have you been?” she asks.
Perhaps, to an outsider, they might sound like childhood mates reconnecting.
If it were only so simple for the two of them.
Tarnished x Heartworm
they say only the good die young. A being that is the epitome of ethereal, she seems to be in a fog. Wandering in a fairy land that he can’t see, head in the clouds. A place he cannot touch, isn’t extended an invitation. She turns her beautiful face with the perfect almond eye, revealing the ugly massacre of the left side of her face. He freezes and frowns, not expecting such a gruesome sight. A flash in the depths of red, his horror turning to outrage. Who would desecrate such a beautiful specimen? She was so fragile, so light and free. Who would dare to harm one so innocent?
She seems unaware of the mix of feelings that are stirred within him at the sight of her fractured skull and empty socket. Tears threatening to spill in the one lonely eye, such a knowing look. As if they had met before, as if she knows him. Surely he would remember someone such as her?
Where have you been? His lips part to correct her, to tell her she was mistaken. She was recalling someone else. Yet something in her voice gives him pause. Something about her triggers a discomfort that he’s been constantly pushing back, that sharp nagging in the back of his head. Where had he been? He had stopped trying to remember his childhood or anything about his past because it was so unnerving. It was terrifying. He couldn’t remember anything. Not a face, voice, smell. The words that he finally admits are very different to what he had planned on saying before.
”I don’t know”
no crosses count i want to do it again
@[Nyxia]
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