[open] another promise you couldn't keep

[Anonya]

“A heart was made to live in the dark–
maybe we were, too.”

I’m alive, she remembers thinking.
I’m alive, and the moment her heart started to beat her veins were flooded with sorrow and hurt.
I’m alive, she thinks, and she wishes she wasn’t.

She does not remember how she passed back through the veil that led her back to here. Not into the land of Beqanna’s living, but into Beqanna at all.

She had lived here, once, but the memories are hazy. She had died here too, and that she remembers even less clearly. The last life that she remembers was not  here, but a different place. She remembers the vibrant colors, and how even she was painted differently; no longer a pure, lily-white but instead a body of ivory and a mane and tail of dusty pink, with nearly translucent flowers in places. And she remembers him, the man with fire around his legs and the scar across his face, and how he had made her forget, just for a little while, that she was broken.

Dreamscape, it had been called, and she wonders now if it was just a dream.

As quickly as it had started, it had all ended. Her second chance at life – at happiness, if it had even existed – went up in smoke, and when the haze cleared she was back in Beqanna’s afterlife.

Against her better judgement she steps through the veil, and finds herself in a meadow of knee-high grass. She is white again, her skin impossibly smooth, with dark eyes like her mother’s and that same familiar haunted look she had surely learned from her. It’s autumn, and in the distance she can see trees alight with crimson and gold and orange, backlit by a late afternoon sun, and she thinks she had loved autumn, once.

Her heart stirs, sluggish and slow, and she’s not sure if she loves anything at all now.

anonya.