take apart your head -- chew it up and swallow it.

[Eight]

no matter what they say, I am still the king

There is a pull and tear of time and space; a neverending spray of what will ever be, never come, forever stay. Nothing ever changes when you are might and magic and all the intricacies in between. It is all the same; a steady wear of one day to the next, a slow ebb on the bruise of your heart. The ones you love die, the places you know change, the things you care for were never really there at all. There will never be a steady bridge, just a passing of time.

Of course he had to follow her. He is not a sentimental man, he does not carry the ink of love in his heart or the ache to carry ties. He simply is. He is here one day, and gone the next - an ever fluctuating, never reliable, hurtful and reckless mess. But he had to follow her. For all his faults in being a father, ruler, lover, friend and foe - he holds ties to those that were once beside him.

And so Greta left the small world he created her (to be safe, you see, and also maybe a bit selfish). He was bored - a listless and chaotic thing. He could never stay complacent for long. And every thing he pulls towards him turns into a play thing. (Lover, child, foe, and land). He created the mess she is - his spiteful laughter as he watched her grow in the womb. Obey he said; and so she must. Come hither, he said once he was bored and tired of the do nothing days. Go - go to Beqanna, with your wrecked curse of following each command. He wanted to see, wanted to play, wanted to know what a world would be like if you could do nothing but what others said (so different, he thought, than what he knew)

And so she did - she pulled at those invisible threads that kept her so safe and sound, her body begging to follow those commands. Quite frankly, he was tired of tying knots. And so he followed; curious to see the chaos ensue. She obeyed (as she must) - and fell into the maw of Pangea.

But he? He has no rules; no law to follow, no command to obey, no story to tell. And so, he simply appears - a blackened shadow in the murky glaze of the forest, a silent standby, watching and waiting (for another trap to snare).

∞

and now the storm is coming, the storm is coming in

[Desire]

sometimes I'm terrified of my heart;
of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants —

She is not often found away from her twin, but she has been tentatively toying with her independence.

Stave was so enthralled by the shadow queen and Pangea, and while Desire liked both of them well enough, she wanted something else. She doesn’t know what – she can’t put a name on it, and she’s not even sure if it has one. She just knows she was born with an insatiable hunger in her heart; like it was empty and starved and it needed to be filled, but she isn’t sure how to do it. Her chest feels hollow most of the time, like an endless cavern, and her heartbeat made an echo that could sing for eternity.

She had asked Stave, once, what he did to fill up his empty heart, because she was so sure he must feel it, too, because how could he not? They were created in the same moment of time, their heartbeats formed together, and they breathed their first breaths only moments apart – and so she forgets, sometimes, that though they are made of all the same things, they are still different. His heart, she learned, was not the same as hers; and though she had thought there was nothing left to drain from hers, this revelation proved her wrong.

She doesn't know what she will find here, but, she decides it is worth being alone, at least for a little bit.

In the shadows of the forest she is almost too bright. Glittering and swirling galaxies bleed across the vibrant white of her skin, like a ghost made of stardust slipping through the trees. It’s dark here, but it does not occur to her to be afraid; she is still beautifully naive in her young age, and of course her mother never warned her of all the things that could go wrong, of all the monsters that called Beqanna home (of course Ryatah wouldn't think to warn her daughter away from the darkness).

When the black of her eyes settles on the face of the stallion swathed in shadows, there is no hesitation in the smile that brightens across her lips. “You’re alone, too?” Her voice is silvery in comparison to the darkness around them, sweet and a little breathless when she takes in his handsome face. Already she has moved closer, and the thought that this could be dangerous – to be lovely and young and alone with a stranger in the middle of a dark forest – never occurs to her. “My name is Desire.”

Desire