"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
Today is one of her more lucid days. She can remember mother, the cold sand color of skin that was neither gold nor silver but somewhere in-between, an impossible shade that should not exist and yet did anyway. She remembers the gruesome twist of her half face, the awkward way her words slurred together and the way smiles seemed to slip right off her mouth as soon as they appeared. She remembers father too, dark and ominous in a way she could not explain, his face changed also by the weight of his past and his present. But it was not like Elses face, where literal flesh and bone and muscle had caved in on itself. It was the tension around his mouth and along his jaw, the heaviness of eyes impossibly dark and sad. The weight of entire worlds sitting in the craters at his shoulders where once there had been wings that cracked and bled and peeled apart.
She remembers them because He allows her to, because He knows how much it hurts her to remember. In some ways it helped that He had made them forget, Else and Caius and everyone she had met as a small child. Especially Else. Elanor did not want them to know the hands she had fallen into, whose bottomless eyes swallowed her soul each time He smiled wide like a crocodile and called her close. But even though she felt something like relief knowing they would not worry or wonder, she knew why he had done it. There was something that far surpassed the simplicity of loneliness, something cold and heavy that she had come to know by the weight it left in her chest beside the echo of her broken heart.
No one was looking for her.
No one loved her.
No one even remembered her.
Her heart shuddered wildly within her chest, the sorrow rippling outwards in waves she could barely endure. It was so easy to wonder if any of this was even real, if Elanor existed at all or if the true reason no one looked for her was because she was just a rogue figment of imagination, a poor beast caught in an endless vicious dream, a never-ending hell. He kept her frozen between the folds of time and space, her inert body tethered to Him when he carried on with His day charming strangers with the ability of a viper. She was there, always, but no one ever noticed because He never let them.
Did she even exist at all.
Her eyes flashed open and she startled because she had not remembered closing them. She did not dream anymore, the kindness of escaping to her sleep did not suit Him, and instead when she closed her eyes she had visions of falling, of depths darker than His eyes and an eternity of sinking until He caught her like an embrace of broken glass. But when she peered out at Him reluctantly, the trembling of her heart in perfect unison with the shivers racing along her skin, there was only the dark of a starless night to greet her. She flinched without meaning to as a brittle wariness stole the breath from her lungs.
“Just let me fall.” She tried to whisper in a voice she knew would be brittle and broken and wildly hoarse if He let her speak at all. “Please just let me fall.”
"Just let me fall. Please just let me fall." She can speak but only to his mind, the only place that he allows her, so when he hears these words it is with a wicked smile that he wanders through the Meadow and the Forest. He goes until he is in the canyons of some forgotten part of the Desert and hovers her body over a drop. Here where they are alone, he makes her visible. He pulls her from that pocket in time, holding her with his magic until she opens her eyes and all she sees is down.
There was fear there and then with a laugh he releases the magic hold on her and she falls and falls until she hits the broken rocks on the bottom. And he allows her this, his mental leash on her soul keeping her in her body and not allowing her to leave even in death. He lets her agonize, bleeding all over with bones sticking from her legs and ribs puncturing her lungs. Her breathing rattles and he floats down to her body. His teeth find an unmarred spot on her cheek, drawing blood before his tongue follows the path his teeth had made. He smiles against her blood. "How was the fall my dear?"
He left her there, for what seemed like hours, sometimes he was there but most of the time he wasn't. Or at least not where her eyes or soul could feel him. Finally he is back and he walks in a small circle around her broken body, still tethered to life. "I should let you suffer here for days beauty." He says, stopping to tilts his head at her. Then he sighs and she is healed. "Get up." His voice holds that edge that says if she doesn't get up herself he will help her and it will be about as pretty as falling off a cliff.
And when she finally gets up, he sighs to himself and tucks her back into that pocket of space to return to the forest where he turns her into a white mouse. He smiles, holding her in place until his body turns into a black rattlesnake. He releases her. Run. His rattle starts to shake, and he waits until she disappears into the brush before he slides after her. It really wasn't going to be much of a sport as he knew where she was always, but he would let her think she could possibly get free. Wouldn't that be fun?
He pulls her out of that pocket in time, out of that wretched hole carved in space just for her. There is enough time for her to notice three things. The first is the gold and red of the Desert, of her home, the place of her family and, as though it had been struck with a hammer, she can feel her heart explode. So close, she is so close to a place that had always felt same and safe and maybe even a little boring. But so close means nothing to someone who does not exist anymore. The second thing she notices is that he holds her body over a precipice, over an impossible edge with jagged, glittering rocks below her like broken teeth in a yawning mouth. The third thing she notices is the fear, and somehow it feels new and raw and not nearly as dull as it should be when his wickedness was something she had known for so long. But this fear is new and it rears within her like a trapped beast, thrashing wildly against her chest and her ribs and the pulp of her heart even as he drops her.
Time does not slow down for her as she falls, she has never been so lucky. Instead the yawning ground reaches out to collect her with a crunch and the slick, wet sound of blood spilling over split skin. The pain is not immediate, not until shock has a chance to gather and swell and recede just a little. But once it does she aches for death. Only death could make this better. She can feel each bone that pokes through the reddening tawny of her broken skin. Can feel each organ puncture and the way her lungs deflate within her chest. She gasps and coughs and wheezes, struggles to retch but there is only blood and froth on her lips. Like a fool she tries to stand, even now she tries to run from him, but her legs are dead weight beneath her and she realizes with sudden horror that her spine must have been severed in the fall. When he appears beside her and his teeth tear into the smooth cold-sand color of once beautiful skin, she is barely cognizant. The only thing she can understand is the pain.
Until he leaves her.
Then she remembers fear.
She lays there broken and hissing air, tether to a body split wide open and useless. The only thing she knows if the pain, the only fear is that he will not come back for her. That he might leave her in this limbo for eternity. But he does return, I should let you suffer here for days, beauty. And in her pain induced stupor she recognizes even more confusion. Had he not already done so? It had felt like a lifetime tethered to this broken body, tethered to the pain as he had tethered her to himself. She can hear him sigh but she cannot see him, cannot move for the way he split her spine. Then, suddenly, the pain fades (all but the memory that now exists like a brand beneath her skin) and he bades her to rise. She does not challenge him this time, she remembers herself now. On unsteady legs she trembles beside him, her dark eyes fixed submissively on the bloodstains, her blood, that still seeped into the ground around the broken stones. When he plucks her out of this world an into that strange shadow dimension, she is at last complacent. She does not speak or lift her eyes, does not even think of the life she wished she had.
But even this obedience is not enough for him. He plucks her out of the dark place, that lonely place, and suddenly those newly healed bones are shrinking and twisting until she is nothing more than a common white mouse. Her small heart is racing immediately, even before he becomes a gleaming black snake, even before the sound of his rattle is all she can hear. Instinctively she darts away from him into the forest, ducking through grass and leaves and roots like great valley walls towering over her. The rattling fades and she pauses, whiskers twitching as if to test the air. Something startles her, maybe a leaf rustling through the forest, maybe something more ominous, but she is off again. She ducks beneath the thicker brush, through rotten hollow logs, and the longer she runs the more she can feel that dangerous pressure she had come to know as hope swelling in her chest.
