long ago in a kingdom by the sea; gail

[gail]

tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us

She remembered dying, and she’d loved it. It was been romantic, almost sickeningly so – wrapped up in the embrace of a stallion whom she’d loved dearly. Myrrdin had been sweetness, warmth, an entirely different love than she kind she kept for Carnage. Myrddin was the sort of love you chose, the kind who sat with you on star-swept nights and counted constellations, who whispered your name like poetry. Carnage was more like some vital organ, a heart beating inside of her, the kind of love you cannot help but have because it is an integral part of you, a story writ on your bones. She remembers dying, and she remembers coming back, too. Coming back, forced back into the meadow, furious. But you can only be furious at your heart for so long. So they had gone, then, moved on – she’d gone with Carnage to the end of the world, where the world was falling to the langoliers, and they’d stood there waiting for the world to end, his warmth to hers. They’d stood and waited and then he had no longer been there, gone, ripped back. That had been neither death nor life, the stasis that followed. Time ceased to exist, the same hours repeated themselves tireless, resetting. The langoliers grew no further or closer. She existed and did not exist. She was alive and she was dead. She was Schrodinger’s dream, existing in the strange half state, the perpetual woman of a world where time was gone. Until they had come, Carnage’s acolytes. They had come and brought her back to a world that no longer wanted her. Thus, this. Thus, this halfway place where the spirits roam. Some look solid, some do not. She found a girl – Graveling – and loves her dearly, raises her like a child. (She misses children, though her own are mostly here, having met untimely ends.) She would recognize his brood anywhere. Certainly the land (of the dead and the living) are rife with them. This one somehow seems even more familiar than a certain structure of the face, and she wonders if they met in times Before. “Hello,” she says, then, “I feel like we’ve met.”

gail