[open] oh, this my weapon, this my loam; any

[irisa]

and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love

They are a strange pair, to be sure. As he envies her delicacy, her web-spun qualities, she admires the rough edges of him, the antlers protruded and the wings shifting, his wind-chafed features that look at her with something that she thinks is curiosity.
He asks what happened to her world and she doesn’t know how to answer. Perhaps the world still exists, perhaps Heartworm is still dreaming (she doesn’t know – she hasn’t seen mother in years, now).
“It was my mother’s dream,” she says, though she doesn’t know how this logic translates, how many are aware of that particular power, know how to make sense of it.
“It was hers, and she woke up one day and couldn’t take me with her.”
There’s more to it, but she doesn’t know how to explain it further, save for one more admission.
“Maybe I didn’t want to go. I didn’t learn about this world for awhile.”
There had been anger, when she learned. She is not angry now – she is a forgiving thing – but sometimes the betrayal comes back to her, a sour note on the tongue.

He’s brief, on his own lands, and she nods, as if she understands.
“Do you live there still?” she asks, curious, but he’s given her another question, circles her back to her own strange world.
“It was…magical. Mother could control anything in the world – the animals and plants and weather. It was always beautiful. Always sunny. She didn’t like the darkness, so it was always daytime. I couldn’t change things, but almost anything I asked for, she would give me.”
A pause, a breath. Her mind whirls in its remembrance.
“But it was hers. It wasn’t mine. Everything lived by her rules. It was hard to be autonomous.”
A word she’d learned not long ago, and when she had, it had struck her like a weight. A word she’d been searching for.
Free to govern herself. To blaze her own trail in this world.

Irisa

tarnished x heartworm