07-24-2020, 06:44 PM
“I know when you go
down all your darkest roads
I would have followed all the way
to the graveyard.”
down all your darkest roads
I would have followed all the way
to the graveyard.”
“Yes, more than once,” she confirms, thinking briefly on all the times she has been dead. A quick glance to her companion, and she reads the question on her face. She forgets that Beqanna must be strange to those that have not lived here for several lifetimes – through catastrophes and land shifts, through magic being stripped and then practically vomited back. It must sound unbelievable that someone could die more than once, or enter the afterlife without being dead at all. “Death has always refused to keep me. Even when I look for it, even when I’m asking for it.” There had been a time, not so long ago, when she had thought she had wanted to die. She had thought she was no longer afraid of it because this new world was so different from what she was used to, and she was so tired of being a living ghost. She had let the seawater fill her lungs, had choked on the salt of it, and in that peculiar rebirth on the cold floor of his lair, she had realized how much she was not ready to die.
Not yet.
Not when there were still so many different ways she could be broken and remade, not when the magic of Beqanna itself insisted on granting her golden veins and gilded wings.
She would stay, this time, and see this place through to the end – until everything turned to ash and stardust, and there was truly nothing left for her.
The topic shifts to love, and that wretched heart of hers jumps. She knows everything and nothing about love. She knows that she would split herself open and drain herself dry for someone that cannot love her back, just as she knows that she will close herself off the moment real love is offered to her. She’d had a love that had been so beautiful and so solid that it had taken actual effort to dismantle it. And she didn’t stop until she did – didn’t stop until she destroyed the man she claimed to love more than anything, until she pushed away the only soul to ever love her back. She had traded Skellig for reckless, careless romance, and never looked back.
“Love,” she begins, the word soft and familiar in her mouth, and it tastes like so many different things she can hardly single them out (like long-lost jungles and silent pleas to follow her from the afterlife, like an ocean in her lungs and stars on her tongue, or a scarred chest beneath the soft feel of her mouth). “Is a beautiful and terrible thing.” Her dark eyes catch and hold onto the blue of Lilliana’s, a strange, knowing hush to her tone when she adds, “It will destroy you from the inside out if you let it. Sometimes it’s worth it, and sometimes it isn’t.”
Not yet.
Not when there were still so many different ways she could be broken and remade, not when the magic of Beqanna itself insisted on granting her golden veins and gilded wings.
She would stay, this time, and see this place through to the end – until everything turned to ash and stardust, and there was truly nothing left for her.
The topic shifts to love, and that wretched heart of hers jumps. She knows everything and nothing about love. She knows that she would split herself open and drain herself dry for someone that cannot love her back, just as she knows that she will close herself off the moment real love is offered to her. She’d had a love that had been so beautiful and so solid that it had taken actual effort to dismantle it. And she didn’t stop until she did – didn’t stop until she destroyed the man she claimed to love more than anything, until she pushed away the only soul to ever love her back. She had traded Skellig for reckless, careless romance, and never looked back.
“Love,” she begins, the word soft and familiar in her mouth, and it tastes like so many different things she can hardly single them out (like long-lost jungles and silent pleas to follow her from the afterlife, like an ocean in her lungs and stars on her tongue, or a scarred chest beneath the soft feel of her mouth). “Is a beautiful and terrible thing.” Her dark eyes catch and hold onto the blue of Lilliana’s, a strange, knowing hush to her tone when she adds, “It will destroy you from the inside out if you let it. Sometimes it’s worth it, and sometimes it isn’t.”
ryatah
@[lilliana]