All that matters is the time we had [yanhua]

[Borderline]

despite the overwhelming odds, tomorrow came

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. I hadn’t noticed his face as I stumbled into him, but the second I touched him, I could feel the revulsion pulsing through his body like an electrical shock. What came next, however, was worse than any kind of electrical shock. What came next ripped and tore into the depths of my heart like an unfathomable beast whose only intention was to rip every shred of me to tinier and tinier shreds.

As @[Yanhua] rips himself away from me, I feel myself falling. In that gut-wrenching half of a second, my brain registers nothing but pain and anguish that my body simply cannot cope. And I find my entire ego crashing with it, my entire will to live, extinguished in that instant. The tears fall stop falling. My body goes limp. @[Leilan] catches me with a wing, but I don’t even notice, and it doesn’t help for long. You cannot hold up a limp figure with just a wing.

As if in slow motion, my back legs buckle beneath me, and my front legs crumple. Leilan says something to Yanhua, but I don’t register it. If I had, maybe it would have worked to calm me, might have helped me to understand exactly what was happening, that I’d died and been rebirthed in some sort of trippy scene. Or maybe it wouldn’t have, because my heart was simply crushed, and all I could think about was that. Then time seems to speed up, and I crash, hard, into the ground.

Excruciating pain shoots through my shoulder, and an agonizing scream wrenches itself from my throat. The scream reverberates through the trees. The pine needles rustle against it, and the leaves on the nearby ferns shiver in complaint. And then I lay still, breathing, but unable–or perhaps unwilling–to move.

For a few moments, I lay there, unaware of anything going on around me, consumed by the agony continues to shred me from within. And then I want to cry. I want to scream his name. Yanhua, I thought, and then I wanted to cry again. My eyes are still open, and as if from a distance, I register the world around me. I can see Yanhua, and I can see Leilan, but my eyes are only for the chestnut goat-stallion, pleading, begging, confused, and now searching for answers.

Borderline

Image by Calcifer