06-01-2016, 11:17 AM
tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us He comes back. Perhaps it could have been any of the six, had the others chosen to come back to this haunted ground. But perhaps not. Back at the end of the world, when reality split off and they each played their hand, he’d been the one to touch her. To say, I won’t leave you like you’ve been left before. And maybe it had happened, then, a spark ignited, inevitability rising on creaking bones. Because from then on he comes back. He comes back and saves her not-daughter, comes back and shows her his wounds, comes back when she shouts his name into an abyss. She wonders if her dark god knows, or senses it, in whatever universe he now inhabits. If some string vibrates, a sign that her own universe shifts. That she grows stronger. That there is another, that there is something being made, something she doesn’t acknowledge but rather feels, like a bone-deep ache, but sweeter. You did this, she thinks to him, thinks to no one, you brought all of them to me. He returns, and he is almost white now. He’d nearly been a child when they’d first met, a boy, and now he is a king. He thrives. Yet he comes back. Like maybe that old promise made on the beach while the world ended around them and time reset meant something. She’s used to promises being broken, scattered at her feet like ashes because the man she loves is ultimately a liar. Carnage does not lie to her to be particularly malicious (she thinks), but rather, because he is something so apart from all of them that his reality shifts and what happens in his world does not happen in hers. He does not realize the particular depths of his betrayal. Or perhaps he does. Perhaps he doesn’t care, now that he knows where she is kept, doesn’t care that she is alone, a queen of ghosts with no desire to rule. He might care if he knew the exact way she looks at Ramiel as he materializes, the particular flutter of her stomach and the way she’s drawn to him like magnets. “Ramiel,” she says his name and savors it, “I’m sorry to call you.” She’s not, not really. Maybe she’s the liar. “I’m changing,” she says. The strange and dubious powers have leeched into her skin and she isn’t sure what to do with them. Isn’t even sure what she can even do. She only knows her body sometimes thrums with a new energy. She is this land, its gatekeeper, and the connection grows stronger. It remakes her. “Like I’m being remade,” she continues. She isn’t sure how to explain it. Isn’t even sure an explanation exists. “And it scares me, a little. I-“ she stutters, does not meet his eyes, “- I didn’t want to be alone.” |