[private] love is for fools who fall behind, ana

[kensley]

i swore the days were over of courting empty dreams
i worshiped at the altar of losing everything

He has been a dead thing for weeks now.
Or has it been months?

He had kept track of the cycle of the sun for the first week or two. He had swallowed each sunset and then waited, patient, for the sun to return. In those days, he had known exactly how long he had been dead. Or undead. But it has been so long now that he has lost track. And what good did tallying the days do anyway? All it had done was remind him of all the things he had lost, the things he would never get back.

In all that time – the weeks or the months that have passed since he came back a dead thing – he has learned everything there is to know about being a dead thing. He has felt neither hunger nor thirst in all that time. He has drawn breath but only sporadically and only out of habit. The heart has not stirred in the cavern of his chest. He has cut himself on sharp things and he has not bled. He has not slept. He has found himself impervious to the heat that swells with the coming of summer.

There is only one thing he does not know, has not been able to test.
How will the heart – dead and useless – react to her?

Word has traveled as far as the meadow, the last place he saw her. Word of a shadowmare taking over the land of Pangea. So it is there that he goes. He remembers the kindness of a stranger in the earliest days of his return to Beqanna, the way she had breathed a magic into him that had chased the exhaustion from his muscles. He thinks about how he does not need the magic now. Because the muscles do not quiver with the effort it has taken him to travel, he does not feel even the slightest edge of tired.

He arrives in Pangea exactly as he had left the meadow. Nothing at all.

He descends into the great canyon, scans the horizon, surveys the landscape.
And then he lands eyes on her.

He would know her anywhere.
And the heart, that cursed, stagnant heart, it stirs in the cavern of his chest.

But that is all it does. It does not leap or throb. It simply acknowledges that it knows her, that it loves her.

“Ana,” he calls out, but the shape of her name leaves him as little more than a breath.

i'm finding all this well-worn sadness i never knew i kept
and i still chase you into heartache every time you take a step

@[Anaxarete]