the edges are unfilled; quark

[gail]

tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us This is the irony of it – sometimes, death feels alive. Certainly death feels like a living thing the way it creeps and crawls over her. She, who once sat at the end of the world while time stopped and the same few minutes repeated themselves, over and over again, all to the concerto of the langoliers coming, heralding the world’s end. Death slunk over her then, penetrated every part of her so that when finally time started up again and she tried to return to Beqanna, Beqanna spat her back out, spat her into this realm where the dead walked and the living could so rarely come. This land, too, seeps into her. She’s felt the changes, a low thrum of something in her bones, in her marrow. She can’t precisely articulate it, but she thinks of how trees will sometimes grow around inanimate objects, ensconce them in their cores, and she thinks it might be something like that. Death magic. Death something, anyway. Though it seems useless. She can’t do any strange magic tricks, can’t snap her fingers and make fire appear the way he so often did. She can’t leave the place. What she can do is this - sense things. And today she is looking out, her mind emptied, when an alarm bell goes off inside her. The thing that lives inside her is howling and scrabbling at its walls. For she senses something. A counterbalance, light to her dark. A power that is not magic but isn’t not-magic. Something mythical and strange and so unlike she powers she knows, so unlike his god-like magic and her own deathliness. Without thinking, she reaches out, imagines fingers stretching beyond the sky, back into Beqanna (though the Beqanna she pictures is long gone, long destroyed, she hasn’t been there in centuries). The fingers reach out. They reach out, and they touch. Come, she thinks, please, show me what you are.