sweet dreams are made of these; nyxia

[heartworm]

tell me we’re dead and I’ll love you even more;

Try to wake up.
She will do it. For one moment, she will bring them back – bring them all back – and she will leave this girl – this intruder - and then they will go to sleep again, go back, go back to the world she has built.
(Surely it won’t crumble in her absence. It is stronger now. She had learned from her mistakes.)
It’s like swimming, trying to wake up. Like drowning. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want any of this. But she can’t have her world crack again. Not again.
(The memory of it is like waves, rising – salty and dreadful, unable to nourish her. A panther dripping jewels, a feral scream, her daughter collapsing, nothing but skin and bones.)

                                            try to

try, try, swim up up up -- they clamber into wakefulness and it’s slow, and when she tries to suck in air it’s like molasses and for a moment her lungs seize, she chokes on this, on air, on life.

                                            wake up

She can do this she can do this she can do this.
Breathe in. Breathe out.

***

Irisa doesn’t know what this feeling is – like being dragged under, like being shaken. She doesn’t know the word for disaster, but had she, it would have been the first word to spring to mind. She cries out, soft at first, then screams – fear rises in her, a wide and previously unknown  emotion, now a wild animal shrieking and clawing in her bones. The world around them is dissolving, changing, and then blackness –

***

They wake in the meadow. It is dull and terrible. Heartworm sees the girls sprawled out beside her and for a moment her heart stops before Irisa’s eyes blink open, dazed.
“Irisa,” she croaks. Her voice is rusty and disused. She is a pale gray again, like dishwater. Irisa, though – she looks as she always had. White as clouds, shining rainbow in the sun, great wings folded on her back.
“Let’s go back, darling, we’ll be safe again, now,” she says, and pleading oils her voice, makes the words slide easier. She beckons sleep, summons it, she is ready to fall back under, back to the their palace, their animals, their kingdom.
But Irisa is looking around, taking it in. No one is close, but other horses can be seen in the distance. And their sister, slumped out on the grass beside them. And something is dawning in her eyes, a terrible sunrise of realization, and Heartworm tries to make her sleep, but she cannot do such things unless the other is willing.
And Irisa is no longer willing.
Irisa is climbing to her feet, unsteady as a newborn foal, and taking in the world.
Irisa is alive.

HEARTWORM

I DON'T REALLY KNOW WHAT THIS IS BUT IT NEEDED TO BE WRITTEN

[Nyxia]

my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things

She feels the pull back into that darkness.

—the pull back to father – (the pull back to worms) – the pull away and towards...

She panics. She lurches forwards towards Heartworm, moaning and thrashing, but the world warps and roils and her move forward throws her ever backwards, instead. (Falling, or climbing.) In a split second she thinks she can understand that all of this is her making. Somehow – their paradise and their downfall. “Wait!” It curdles on her tongue, too thick to escape. Jeweled blues become greys and pastels fade and darken. Animals scream – a million different languages – because this is their world, too.

It is as if her whole body is being forced through a knot in a tree. She sucks in air but the pulls are weak, as if through lungs now made of iron and immovable parts. She blinks, searching the whorl for Irisa, for some indication that she is not going alone. For some comfort, here. But when she calls out she knows they are deaf, dumb and blind, all.

And that darkness comes.

---

She is floating. Or she is standing, still and silent. 

It is dark, and when she looks behind her, it is only darkness that waves back. And forwards is dark, too, so she stands still and waits. Forever. Or for a moment. This darkness has no edges; its edges are smooth as the walls of a black, glass sphere. It has no beginning and no end.

‘Father?’

It has no time. Or perhaps its time is slow! Like every minute here is an hour beyond. Or fast.

It doesn’t matter, she is simply in transit.

‘Irisa?’

She tries to take a step but there is a suck like wet sand that keeps her still and silent. Floating. And then she sees a pinpoint of light somewhere far away, like a distant, extinct star. It comes, cold like trepidation, hurtling ever towards her. Behind it, smaller because they are further away in their pursuit, are bright constellations. Sweeping back and mirrored – ram’s horns; straight up, and then blooming out at the top with a dozen scattered arms – a tree. She quakes, her blood running hot with fear.  ‘Wait.’ 

It takes hours or seconds, but steadily, they all grow in size and in heat. When they are unbearably close, she turns away from them and as she does gravity jerks her hard to the ground.

They consume her, like a fire does wood.

---

She does not gulp in air.

Her lungs are dying. Not iron or immovable, but oxygen-deprived, blue-skinned organs. So she is still and silent and waits. ‘Let’s go... darling... safe again.’ Her nostrils twitch and test their flare, lapping up thin wisps of air. Slowly, but surely, her nerves tingle as each tastes for her return. They have been waiting. The soft, lavender skin, crusted with blood and dirt and sand. One golden eye, peeking up into the soft glow of sun beyond her shuttered lid; the other is no more, choked out by the swell of her face and then by the damage done. It was irreversible.

It could not wait, though it had tried.

Her lips part letting in the taste of old blood and dust. Her mouth is terribly dry but she pries her thick tongue from the roof of her mouth and groans. Slowly, but surely, pain takes her, wholesale. Nyxia’s eye blinks open, bloodshot and unfocused, and she labours to raise her head. Dry blood binds the left side of her face to the ground like glue, and when she pulls up grass and dirt come with her, plastered there. She can hold it up long enough to see them there – long enough to see that she is not wholly alone – before she lets it fall again with a moan.

She cannot fathom how she got here. She had been taken in sand and still it sticks to her where her skin had moistened from the heat. She had been in a paradise and then in darkness. They had all spit her out here. But how long had she been gone? The swelling has subsided, leaving behind a view of her crooked and empty eye, and the scars that marred her skin where healing had failed to sew her up nicely. The blood has crusted, dried, but had not flaked off like old paint, yet. 

What had taken her body from the Desert, after father had seen her fallen and fell himself, after the war, and before the water could swallow her whole and finish her off?

“I’m… thirsty…” Nyxia croaks, hoping it is loud enough. It is all she can manage, trifling as it seems. But the mysteries that echo in her head like the cacophony of those many-tongued screams submit themselves to baser, simpler things, for now. She knows, somewhere near, there is a brook. And sure enough, when she strains, she can hear it passing softly over its riverstone bed.

“We’re... home?”

and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.