She imagines she can feel Him there inside her mind, sharing her eyes so that they are seeing this together. It is the loneliness inside her chest, leftovers from a life already lived in entirety but with no time lost, that makes her want to share more than just this view. She wants to know His thoughts, too. If He has ever felt the kind of fear she feels now, or the sense of wonder as this shared view settles on something she absolutely cannot fathom. She is just a roach, after all, she is not like Him.
<i>There.</i> He says, and she clings to that single word as the world around her seems to absorb every decibel of sound until it is shaking with it, aching to come undone. <i>Through there. And hurry. It’s hungry.</i>
She does not even notice that his voice is all wrong.
A new tremor of fear runs through her as she watches that disk shiver and grow, undulating like a shimmering puddle as the shape warps and swallows more of the dark space around it. <i>I can’t.</i> She thinks, and there is a sad kind of desperation burning in her chest as she tries to reach Him with that frightened thought, tries to make Him someone safe to hold onto in this torrent of constant impossibilities. But He only exists to urge her on again, and she feels almost like a child with the way she wants to cling to Him.
She takes a single step backwards, and then another, inching away from the cliff as though there is any way to escape all of this - to escape the sound and the sight and the <i>it</i> that is hungry. Her body shivers again, and it feels as though there are eyes crawling all over every inch of her, learning every single thing she would have otherwise kept secret, kept safe within the cage of her delicate chest. <i>I don’t want this.</i> She decides, taking another step back - she even goes so far as to tear her gaze from the circular shimmering irregularity, refusing it.
It is, of course, in that moment that the cliff crumbles beneath her feet and the choice to jump is stolen from her, just as everything else has been taken.
Sybella had never imagined what it would be like to fall into perpetuity, to exist only in the dark of the in-between with nothing to see or touch, nothing but fear and nausea making her dizzy as an eternal black slips past her. But she wonders now, feeling so small and so changed, feeling like this is a nightmare that might never end, even despite the way it seems to keep beginning again. Death, the fog, this strange new damnation. If she had ever doubted that she were nothing to this world, to any world, she surely believes it now. She is a cockroach, a speck. She is disposable.
And then she is not alone anymore, and again she wonders why she ever thought alone was a bad thing. Just as she wonders why she ever thought sound was any kind of beautiful. There is another presence in her mind now, it wears her thoughts like a mask, pretends to be Sybella, and she only just barely doesn’t believe it. There is no voice she can discern - it is not like when He fills her, it is something more insidious, something that fills the brokenness inside her with itself.
She is a disguise.
<i>Hungry.</i> The thought finds her again, a reminder, and she ignores it, balks because she has nothing to give. <b>Hungry.</b> A command now, but she feels lost inside herself as she falls.
Suddenly there is silence again - a thing so deep and vast that it steals her breath away as she cries out. It is only her echo that comes to find her again, but this sound is strange, disembodied, so very much like it did not come from her after all. She flinches.
<b>You gave nothing, not even a story, something so simple. Easy.</b> She feels mocked by her thoughts, not her thoughts, mocked for her cowardice. <b>Now you lose what you wanted most. You will suffer the discomfort of carrying a child, the pain of birth, but you will never know what it is to be a mother. Every child you bear, and even those you do not, will feel a compulsion not to know you. You will never be seen by them, never heard. You are a ghost to them, just as your mother is to you now.</b>
She feels the last words with such finality, like a weight in her stomach that makes her want to retch. Feels pain and confusion, even doubt. These are her thoughts, are they not? They sound like her and wear her voice, but even she cannot deny that they are wrong. In the next moment her feet touch the floor with such grace that for an instant she does not understand that it is, in fact, the ground beneath her. It feels too gentle for this unending nightmare. Even stranger is that she feels no different, feels completely unchanged except for the way her body vibrates with a sound she cannot hear any longer.
Thoughts scatter from her like spilled stones, and she stumbles forward a step as she confirms the ground beneath her feet is solid and real. It is, so she turns to look back up from where she fell, a suspicious frown on that violet face as she searches the dark for something that is not there. Nothing is there. But it feels so much like she left part of herself behind that it takes a long moment for her to stop looking for a distant reflection. Is that why it still feels this way, like her bones might shake apart? Is it because there is another version of herself still standing on the cliff, staring into the circular shimmering nothing while this copy takes shape in the dark between?
Of all the things she has encountered, this thought does not feel like an impossible one.
She turns again and forces the last thought out of her mind, the one that settles in her belly like acid, eating away at her inside. Could it really be true that she will never raise a child? She clings to a naive hope that maybe this, like her lifetime lost, is just another hallucination, just some kind of paranoid dream. But even as her eyes land dully on something writhing in the distance, she is well aware that she cannot remember anything about the woman who had raised her. There is no name, no face, not even a remembered feeling of warmth and love. But, she reasons, pausing where she stands to watch that distant tumult of movement, she hadn’t actually known her mother, right?
<b>sybella lost her ability to be a mother. she can give birth, but children will feel a compulsion to not notice her. she also lost her memories of her own mother.</b>
<i>There.</i> He says, and she clings to that single word as the world around her seems to absorb every decibel of sound until it is shaking with it, aching to come undone. <i>Through there. And hurry. It’s hungry.</i>
She does not even notice that his voice is all wrong.
A new tremor of fear runs through her as she watches that disk shiver and grow, undulating like a shimmering puddle as the shape warps and swallows more of the dark space around it. <i>I can’t.</i> She thinks, and there is a sad kind of desperation burning in her chest as she tries to reach Him with that frightened thought, tries to make Him someone safe to hold onto in this torrent of constant impossibilities. But He only exists to urge her on again, and she feels almost like a child with the way she wants to cling to Him.
She takes a single step backwards, and then another, inching away from the cliff as though there is any way to escape all of this - to escape the sound and the sight and the <i>it</i> that is hungry. Her body shivers again, and it feels as though there are eyes crawling all over every inch of her, learning every single thing she would have otherwise kept secret, kept safe within the cage of her delicate chest. <i>I don’t want this.</i> She decides, taking another step back - she even goes so far as to tear her gaze from the circular shimmering irregularity, refusing it.
It is, of course, in that moment that the cliff crumbles beneath her feet and the choice to jump is stolen from her, just as everything else has been taken.
Sybella had never imagined what it would be like to fall into perpetuity, to exist only in the dark of the in-between with nothing to see or touch, nothing but fear and nausea making her dizzy as an eternal black slips past her. But she wonders now, feeling so small and so changed, feeling like this is a nightmare that might never end, even despite the way it seems to keep beginning again. Death, the fog, this strange new damnation. If she had ever doubted that she were nothing to this world, to any world, she surely believes it now. She is a cockroach, a speck. She is disposable.
And then she is not alone anymore, and again she wonders why she ever thought alone was a bad thing. Just as she wonders why she ever thought sound was any kind of beautiful. There is another presence in her mind now, it wears her thoughts like a mask, pretends to be Sybella, and she only just barely doesn’t believe it. There is no voice she can discern - it is not like when He fills her, it is something more insidious, something that fills the brokenness inside her with itself.
She is a disguise.
<i>Hungry.</i> The thought finds her again, a reminder, and she ignores it, balks because she has nothing to give. <b>Hungry.</b> A command now, but she feels lost inside herself as she falls.
Suddenly there is silence again - a thing so deep and vast that it steals her breath away as she cries out. It is only her echo that comes to find her again, but this sound is strange, disembodied, so very much like it did not come from her after all. She flinches.
<b>You gave nothing, not even a story, something so simple. Easy.</b> She feels mocked by her thoughts, not her thoughts, mocked for her cowardice. <b>Now you lose what you wanted most. You will suffer the discomfort of carrying a child, the pain of birth, but you will never know what it is to be a mother. Every child you bear, and even those you do not, will feel a compulsion not to know you. You will never be seen by them, never heard. You are a ghost to them, just as your mother is to you now.</b>
She feels the last words with such finality, like a weight in her stomach that makes her want to retch. Feels pain and confusion, even doubt. These are her thoughts, are they not? They sound like her and wear her voice, but even she cannot deny that they are wrong. In the next moment her feet touch the floor with such grace that for an instant she does not understand that it is, in fact, the ground beneath her. It feels too gentle for this unending nightmare. Even stranger is that she feels no different, feels completely unchanged except for the way her body vibrates with a sound she cannot hear any longer.
Thoughts scatter from her like spilled stones, and she stumbles forward a step as she confirms the ground beneath her feet is solid and real. It is, so she turns to look back up from where she fell, a suspicious frown on that violet face as she searches the dark for something that is not there. Nothing is there. But it feels so much like she left part of herself behind that it takes a long moment for her to stop looking for a distant reflection. Is that why it still feels this way, like her bones might shake apart? Is it because there is another version of herself still standing on the cliff, staring into the circular shimmering nothing while this copy takes shape in the dark between?
Of all the things she has encountered, this thought does not feel like an impossible one.
She turns again and forces the last thought out of her mind, the one that settles in her belly like acid, eating away at her inside. Could it really be true that she will never raise a child? She clings to a naive hope that maybe this, like her lifetime lost, is just another hallucination, just some kind of paranoid dream. But even as her eyes land dully on something writhing in the distance, she is well aware that she cannot remember anything about the woman who had raised her. There is no name, no face, not even a remembered feeling of warmth and love. But, she reasons, pausing where she stands to watch that distant tumult of movement, she hadn’t actually known her mother, right?
<b>sybella lost her ability to be a mother. she can give birth, but children will feel a compulsion to not notice her. she also lost her memories of her own mother.</b>