[open] your twisted thoughts like snow on the rooftops

[litotes]

but you’d never get hit without earning it
and i only hit you first ‘cuz i deserved my own hit too
still it comes the time to call you out
since i’m the one that you should be about

There is a dimness that hangs over Litotes’ head, overcast and deepening in its wrath by the second. The hot summer air no longer refreshes him but suffocates him, filling his wracking lungs with what feels like metal. Blood pools and curdles on his bottom lip as his ears press so tight to his skull it appears as if they are not there. This is not like him (at least he does not think so): the sadness stripped to its barest and dirtiest, wretched and decaying bones - anger so repressed that it festers and rots like an open wound in the sun.

The fever shakes him, forces paranoia down his throat like bad medicine. Shadows quiver in the corners of his eyes, hissing ominous spells and wrapping the long black fingers of demons around his throat. There is nothing like this feeling - so lonely in its gut-wrenching fear, not a soul near that understands the mind as it swallows itself whole. This is one of his darkest days. Plague and seasonal depression mix together like the last drink the bartender shakes before one is cut off. He is drifting, moving much more slowly than he realizes, wavering from side to side just as the heat waves create an illusion of a rolling landscape.

Lie coughs, spattering blood across the shimmering silver of his nose: a mixture that would be beautiful were it not so terribly morbid.

Suddenly he stops, lifting his head as it shakes. He stares at a tree, eyes glazed and broken, watching the bark as it jiggles and jives and dances in place. I am not here, he thinks - interrupted only by Rune as she desperately tries to make sense of the mess of his head. The sand cat runs back and forth between his legs, scared for her companion but almost completely helpless. Even his dearly loved companion does not matter - for he is not here.

Anger roils in the pit of his stomach, black and perpetual, spinning hurricane-force circles that tie his intestines into knots. It travels like a snake, slithering up his organs and into his throat, solidifying there (choking him . . . killing him). The tree before him changes, the bark drawing his father’s face, and Lie cannot control himself: he is coughing up endless amounts of near-black blood but unstoppable, slamming his head into the trunk like he could kill his father then and there.

Litotes

cool so his fever + his depression have created a mental breakdown n he's kinda dying :~) open to anyone