jamie
03-18-2026, 09:37 PM
jamie
It is the most he has spoken to a child, he thinks, since he was one. Of his own children, only the Fates had heard so much of his voice. The Nymphs had been banished almost immediately upon their births, stolen away from their mother and shackled to the bodies of water in which they have remained for years. It is not conversation he has with Miseria, he merely whispers his orders directly into her mind and she does his bidding. And he had taken the son down to the water and watched him drown, the daughter safe at her mother’s breast because he had not known what to make of the thing. She had been an accident.
And yet, the boy asks him questions and he considers how to answer. Strangely, he thinks of his mother and the keen interest she had taken in a child, once. Neither him nor his sister, but the White magician, Beyza.
He shifts his weight, thinks to call upon Miseria now to show him a dead thing. Instead, he turns his focus to someplace in the distance, calls upon flesh and bones, watches them piece themselves back together in the approximation of what they’d once been. Rabbits, deer, limp-winged birds, they all hobble, broken, toward them, called upon by the shadow creature.
“They are dead,” he tells the boy without taking his eyes from them. Not until they settle at his flank does he look to the boy again. The boy, who tells him that he has a mother, that it had hurt when he’d fallen. And, with that, Jamie understands that the boy is not dead after all. The dead do not feel pain. He exhales a raspy sigh and the creatures crumple.
“This is Pangea,” he says. He, too, had been born here, though his mother had not abandoned him in quite the same way. “I am not dead and neither are you.”
And yet, the boy asks him questions and he considers how to answer. Strangely, he thinks of his mother and the keen interest she had taken in a child, once. Neither him nor his sister, but the White magician, Beyza.
He shifts his weight, thinks to call upon Miseria now to show him a dead thing. Instead, he turns his focus to someplace in the distance, calls upon flesh and bones, watches them piece themselves back together in the approximation of what they’d once been. Rabbits, deer, limp-winged birds, they all hobble, broken, toward them, called upon by the shadow creature.
“They are dead,” he tells the boy without taking his eyes from them. Not until they settle at his flank does he look to the boy again. The boy, who tells him that he has a mother, that it had hurt when he’d fallen. And, with that, Jamie understands that the boy is not dead after all. The dead do not feel pain. He exhales a raspy sigh and the creatures crumple.
“This is Pangea,” he says. He, too, had been born here, though his mother had not abandoned him in quite the same way. “I am not dead and neither are you.”
so darkness i became
@Ghoulish