[open] i got a secret starting to rust

[jamie]

jamie

I CAN’T EXACTLY DESCRIBE HOW I FEEL
BUT IT’S NOT QUITE RIGHT

For decades, he has slept.
(And he remembers now, when some cosmic shift finally rouses him, how sleep had been his only reprieve as a child.

Isn’t it peculiar to think now that he had ever been young? 
That he had ever been weak?)

He blinks now into the sun.
There has been some change, though he has no interest in examining it now. The limbs unfurl and solidify. He had slept as a shadow, as a ghost, as nothing at all. He is not only a thing waking but a thing coming back to life. 

He had slept in the forest. (Serendipitous, was it not? For Pangea has fallen and he might have fallen with it.) He had tethered himself to the nymph in the water, drawing steadily from her life force, though he hadn’t needed to. He had gone to see her and how her face had lit up at the sight of him. He had feasted on the hope that had blossomed in the empty space around that heart. He had grinned, flashed those lethal teeth, and then curled himself into the earth.

He does not return to her shores now. Instead, he steps out into the light. Into the new ruins.
And he grins, draws in a long, rasping breath. 

There has been much death in the time he spent sleeping.
He gathers the shadows around him, remembering.

AND IT LEAVES ME COLD

[Iris]

all things are poisons

for there is nothing without poisonous qualities.

Being a child did not amount to being weak. Being alive did not require reprieve. This is not something Iris understands, but then again, she was born to power. Her mother was a magic entity, a piece of Beqanna in a sense now. Some of that magic belongs to Iris now, and the dead have always been more of a comfort than a torment to the black mare. She has enjoyed their company, leaning into the whispers, having conversations, seeking revenge on their behalf. The wicked and guilty made for a good outlet to practice her poison manipulation on, and it pleased her ghostly friends.

Though some might say that Iris has taken her own type of reprieve, avoiding the company of the living for so long. Nothing strange or magical had kept her away, she simply preferred the company of the dead to the living. But like moths to a flame, it seems everyone is brought back to Beqanna eventually.

Perhaps then, as death himself unfurls from sleep, it is no accident that Iris finds herself led to him. The dead whisper, chittering in excitement and fear in her ear, leading her on. Iris has learned to trust the dead - they are not trustworthy, mind you, but they like her and have long since stopped trying to lead her into danger.
It comes as no shock that she finds death in the ruins. The dead here do not know her - they are not Beqanna’s dead, and they are not her friends. They are different, and their voices edge out the ones she is familiar with. Hatred roils in their words, pleas for revenge or simply for peace. Warnings echo from the kinder ones - warnings to flee this place and its destruction. Iris does no such thing.

Even with these new dead crowding out her familiar friends, she finds him, the man of shadow who seems even more at home in this place than she does. Flickers of its history come to her from the dead, though she focuses on the living for once. ”I haven’t seen you around here before,” she says, and there’s an implication in that that suggests she would have been led to him no matter what.

it is only the dose that matters

iris

photo by cottonbro

@ jamie (hi I couldn't resist)