endlessly, she said
The Gates were light, they were whimsy and they were pure. At least, that is what is said upon the breeze. The whispers of the land themselves. The Gates were home, they were my birthland, my mother's place to rest, but they were, and I was not. Where my mother watches with hollowed eyes and sunken cheeks, I listen, I hear every quiver of life behind the fallen leaf, every strain of a branch as the wind knocks it. The whispers at night are the worst. The beady eyes of a thousand birds ever watchful, ever there. I swallow a breath, one that had sat in my chest like acid, like the rotten core of a fallen apple. Bittersweet and squirming with maggots.
They say it is safe here, yet they are wrong. The anxiety that pulls at my sinews, knot together and freeze me in place. Audaciously in the heart of the dying green landscape. I'm frozen, eyes around me, watching me, judging me. Ah, my mother, she is right to be frightened. for what lurks in the dark, is far more nightmarish than really what anyone believes.
The whispers pull at my head, my ears. They are all I hear. The gentle thrum of a beating heart, a cadence that grows and grows, frenetic and like a xylophone against my ribcage (at least, I think it's my own heart.) I think of Tioga. Her copper gaze and her soft voice. If it were not for her, I would have been swallowed by the darkness of the woods in the Gates. Consumed by the thousand eyes, eaten by the monsters that lurk the depths.
But I haven't. And now, now I am here. Back here. When I had woken that one time, crow feathers strewn in my mane, prickles knotted in my fur. I had met that strange man. He had tried to take me somewhere, pulled and tugged, but I stayed. As much as the voices, the shadows wanted and needed, I would not have followed him, not even if the woods were burning.
Ah, but they burn, they burn now with a presence of a golden light; one that walks with her own song. Every step is grace and yet power, every turn of her head is a lightning bolt, right in my chest. I then turn my dark gaze to the one beside her; the rich purple of azaleas, of sun-burnt foxglove. He commands the attention but not nearly as much as she. I watch them, intrigue. The voices within, the whispers that strum every bone in my body like a violin, they freeze, they stop and for the first time in my life I hear nothing.
Silence. I never thought silence could be so welcoming. Dull ears turn forward, frosted lips quiver, the need to speak, the need to say something, but just when I am about to, the voices start up. cold, cruel words like knives jarring me in the gut, the ribs. I shiver, and the movement causes me to stir, limbs propelling forward until I stop, right before the girl and the purple boy. His wings as unsettling as the ruffling crows, but then with a whole otherworldly feeling.
There is something in my gut, my tentative heart and broken soul, that pulls me to them both, as if we share something, a sliver of similarity. If only. If only...
K E R N I C K
khaos x reuen