how do I learn my dreams to mold, to lay them bare in the morning cold?
His time on the isle has not been kind.
He has withdrawn from whatever company he could have sought—whatever help could have been there for him—and instead took to the shadows. To the places where he could mourn in peace. His leg, broken and shattered, had not healed quickly or easily—and, in the end, healed correctly at all. It left him with a limp and a shooting pain whenever he bore weight on it; something that made him all the more bitter.
His family was out there, he knew, but they had no idea he was alive, and he had no idea how to possibly swim back to the mainland with his body in the condition that it was in. And, if he was being honest with himself, he was not sure that he wanted to go back home. He wasn’t certain that he could go back to just being a boy with a secret friend from Tephra. He wasn’t certain he wanted to live if she—
His thoughts always ended there.
Abruptly.
It was too difficult to try and finish them. Too difficult to let his splintered mind wrapped around the very possibility that he lived in a world where she didn’t. That she had died so that he didn’t have to.
Sometimes, he cursed her for taking his place when he should have been the one on the other side of that portal. Sometimes, he cursed her for making him be there and watching the magma overtake her.
Leaving him with this shattered leg and a heart of stone.
But all of this leaves him when another portal opens and through it, he sees the glossy, vivid green of the Tephra he had known before the war. Curious, painfully curious, he picks himself up and begins to walk toward it, surrounded by the flurries of snow and the whipping wind. When he reaches it and stumbles through, his leg nearly giving out in front of him, he finds that he is standing in the middle of what he could only possibly describe as some kind of garden and the woman standing there is Linnea’s mother.
He frowns, blinking into the Tephran sunlight, before the portal closes and the cold wind at his back goes away. He blinks again, swinging his head back toward the red-winged woman and then to what he had previously thought was a tree. But the tree is moving and although his heart trips lightly in his chest, overwhelmed by the changes and the surprises, there is something almost familiar about the tree.
It has her voice.
And it has the same shape of her eyes.
“Linnea?” his voice cracks, the edges of it hoarse with winter and disuse. It doesn’t matter that her skin has melted away to be replaced with bark and that her mane has become leaves and flowers or that her eyes are now pink as petals. It doesn’t matter because it’s her and when she touches her nose to him, his heart pounds in his chest. He takes a limping step forward, tears in the corner of his silver eyes.
“It’s you. It’s really you.”
nikolaus
if they’re still out there then the chasm grows
( for all you know, for all you’ve known )