10-25-2021, 04:00 PM
She can remember the devastation from a storm that had fallen out of the sky, out of the ocean to bend trees and hills alike along the southern coast. She can remember the way it had looked like a wall of creeping dark as it sailed to them from across the ocean, remember the roar of the wind as it had stripped leaves from branches and branches from trees, then stripped those trees from their moorings in the flooded too-wet ground. Storms weren’t uncommon, but this one had found her with a violence she had not seen before. A hurricane, someone had called it.
She understands that violence now, understands what kind of pain can make something be so destructive, because it is a thing that takes shape inside her own chest now. A truth borrowed from her father and reborn a weapon inside her. It feels like every inch of her is coming undone, like she is erosion in fast forward, the unraveling of every ugliness she had ever thought herself stronger than. She knows better now, can feel the violence in her defined by this love turned to grief because there is no one to share it with anymore, no outlet.
Ryatah is dead.
Mom is dead.
It is a nauseating kind of truth, a horror she can taste in the bile that threatens to choke her as she abandons whatever sorry life she had built for herself in Taiga. The place is a graveyard now, full to the brim with moments and memories and, now, the ghost of someone she loved more than she ever knew how to love herself. She might have expected this from her father maybe, because he was good at causing others pain, good at making enemies, at being selfish and careless. But never from her mother, never from the woman who is everything Illuminae wished she knew how to be.
Was everything.
She thinks she would like to be a hurricane now, to fall on the shores of her own chest and tear it all to shreds. Unearth bones instead of trees, drown in the flood of her own sorrow because this pain and this sudden loneliness is something she does not understand how to endure. It is something that wounds and ruins, something that breaks her all over again every time her thoughts drift back to that gentle white face.
If she was tired before then she is exhausted now, empty of that fight to be better than these dark impulses inside her chest. She wants to be the storm, to be the ruin, to be the thing that wounds instead of the thing that gets wounded. So she unleashes the dark beneath her skin and remembers how those storm clouds had turned and roiled, how they had stripped bare the trees and left limbs behind like broken bones. She wonders if she can do that too - not the wind or the rain or the lightning, but a mimicry of that same destruction. But it is day still, and when her shadow storm grapples with the branches above her, only the smallest trees bend, only the smallest limbs break. The larger ones just groan with indifference.
She could scream, she thinks, she could scream until her chest is a gash and her heart is something spilled out into the dirt at her feet. But when she unleashes this pain it is a wordless, soundless thing. It is an empathic punch of every ounce of pain now unfurling inside her ribs, every single shard of her broken heart sent outwards like bullets. She closes her eyes and pulls on the darkness again, bending her chin to her chest with a quiet kind of whispered agony only she is meant to hear.
The dark and the shadows fall away from the trees, kidnapped silhouettes that form a massive wall of darkness that churns around her several yards deep. She thinks it must either be a shield or a prison, but when she opens her eyes to reach out and touch it, the dark moves harmlessly past her nose. It is nothing more than a cyclone of shadow rotating slowly around her. It is nothing, because it is a part of her, and she is nothing. She is erosion.
She understands that violence now, understands what kind of pain can make something be so destructive, because it is a thing that takes shape inside her own chest now. A truth borrowed from her father and reborn a weapon inside her. It feels like every inch of her is coming undone, like she is erosion in fast forward, the unraveling of every ugliness she had ever thought herself stronger than. She knows better now, can feel the violence in her defined by this love turned to grief because there is no one to share it with anymore, no outlet.
Ryatah is dead.
Mom is dead.
It is a nauseating kind of truth, a horror she can taste in the bile that threatens to choke her as she abandons whatever sorry life she had built for herself in Taiga. The place is a graveyard now, full to the brim with moments and memories and, now, the ghost of someone she loved more than she ever knew how to love herself. She might have expected this from her father maybe, because he was good at causing others pain, good at making enemies, at being selfish and careless. But never from her mother, never from the woman who is everything Illuminae wished she knew how to be.
Was everything.
She thinks she would like to be a hurricane now, to fall on the shores of her own chest and tear it all to shreds. Unearth bones instead of trees, drown in the flood of her own sorrow because this pain and this sudden loneliness is something she does not understand how to endure. It is something that wounds and ruins, something that breaks her all over again every time her thoughts drift back to that gentle white face.
If she was tired before then she is exhausted now, empty of that fight to be better than these dark impulses inside her chest. She wants to be the storm, to be the ruin, to be the thing that wounds instead of the thing that gets wounded. So she unleashes the dark beneath her skin and remembers how those storm clouds had turned and roiled, how they had stripped bare the trees and left limbs behind like broken bones. She wonders if she can do that too - not the wind or the rain or the lightning, but a mimicry of that same destruction. But it is day still, and when her shadow storm grapples with the branches above her, only the smallest trees bend, only the smallest limbs break. The larger ones just groan with indifference.
She could scream, she thinks, she could scream until her chest is a gash and her heart is something spilled out into the dirt at her feet. But when she unleashes this pain it is a wordless, soundless thing. It is an empathic punch of every ounce of pain now unfurling inside her ribs, every single shard of her broken heart sent outwards like bullets. She closes her eyes and pulls on the darkness again, bending her chin to her chest with a quiet kind of whispered agony only she is meant to hear.
The dark and the shadows fall away from the trees, kidnapped silhouettes that form a massive wall of darkness that churns around her several yards deep. She thinks it must either be a shield or a prison, but when she opens her eyes to reach out and touch it, the dark moves harmlessly past her nose. It is nothing more than a cyclone of shadow rotating slowly around her. It is nothing, because it is a part of her, and she is nothing. She is erosion.
ILLUMINAE
we can't dream when we're awake,
or fall in love with a heart too strong to break
@savage