The adventure begins

[Nyxia]

my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things

Times is strange.

It stretches, without end, in every direction.

(—it ends when She (mother) says it does.
—it begins when she says that, too.)

It wraps around itself a million times over, weaving and knotting. It opens wide, like a pair of welcoming arms – or a set of unhinging jaws. It has teeth, and they bite memories! Or, is it harmless? Harmless, but for the way it pulls them ever towards a potential menace.

...oh! she would have loved for time to stop in the middle of girlhood! Where she could idle, forever, in her nest of earth and windflower. Where father would never come but she would know he was out there somewhere, watching over her. And that would be enough.

Where her friends would be stilled, statues of fur and claws and antlers, in tableaus of play and peace! And where the sun would sit in the sky, half-awake and bleary-rayed, lighting motes of motionless fairydust in the deep, green gloom.

Where she would never have to dream because she would never have to sleep.

But it did not.

It pulled her ever towards.

...and then, one day, she found her way off of it. It had been like stumbling from a path lit up by fireflies, into a darkness so total, it was more like outer space than night. Like nothing. 

An in-between; a transit stop.
A place out of time.

And spending time out of time is strange.

She cannot recall how long her body had waited for her, stuck in time without her to keep it warm. 

In time, her body lost her left eye. It had withered and died in its destroyed socket. Time commands healing as much as it does decay. As it waited, her broken face had fused it’s left side back together, like a puzzle pieced haphazardly. Ugly and blood-crusted, but whole.

Still alive. Waiting.

She cannot remember how long it has been since she last saw father. She had looked for him. And Irisa too, once she had pried her body from the earth. ‘Father’ and ‘Irisa’ burnt her throat and bruised her lips, so in time, she stopped calling for them. 

She stopped trying to make sense of her mother’s world, too. 

Night bleeds into day – just as dreams worm their way into wakefulness; jeweled tigers and warning tongues prowl around her perimeter, always. So when Time stops, it is not the strangest thing she has ever seen. It unsettles her all the same. Her ears press back and forth, trying to find something real in the staleness that suddenly runs her blood icy. 

“H-hello?” …‘mother?’ she thinks, because to Nyxia, it seems the most logical explanation. And that scares her even more because she knows what it is like to be unwanted in her mother’s mind. She knows what it is like to watch a world implode on itself – to be the bug in the illusion.

Nothing answers her ‘hello’, so she stands still. Waits, as she has before, in this in-between. Waits for the shaking and the anger that never comes. Instead, a bitter wind blows in from behind her, disrupting the quiet. It is not rich and leafy, but sharp and desolate. “What?” She peers over her right shoulder, squinting her bright, golden eye and watches, for a moment, as winter eats the autumn like a plague of locusts. Watches in a dull, wistful kind of way before fear returns and she wonders if this is the way this world kills itself.

If this is how it rids itself of her.

She runs, frantic and heaving, racing time itself – (strange, indeed). Flurries of snow rush in around her flanks, and their touch feels wholly unkind; the way the bright leaves fade in her peripheral reminds her all too well of the way a pastel can turn to gray. She runs until she cannot anymore, coming to huddle at the entrance of the cave like a frightened… girl. (Indeed. Time has left her behind, played with her in so many different ways.) She spins to face the onrush of doom, pressing her one good eye closed tight… 

She waits. 
But nothing comes.

When finally she opens it again, she stands in a puddle of safety, surrounded by the utter nothing of winter. She stifles a sob and fights back tears. (She had cried then, too, in that quaking dream world, because she knew she was alone.) But the tears that try to come are interrupted by a muffled scream from deep inside the cave. She gasps and turns, peeking inside, her heart fluttering at the thought of: not alone. 

“Hello?” it echoes back to her, mutated and otherworldly. The glow that bounces eerily off the damp, stone walls does not draw her in. It reminds her of distant, on-coming suns. But when the scream rattles out again, it looses the idleness that keeps her shivering in the leftover autumn. She pushes her way into the dark (she is no stranger, after all; she has been here before, a place between other, unkind places), “Irisa? Father?” She stares, unsure, down the center path, shuffling side to side. “...hello? Anyone?”

Then, without thinking, she follows the path she can see best.

She goes right.

and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.

Nyxia goes right, and prefers a trait over points!