Ryatah
WHEN I WAS SHIPWRECKED I THOUGHT OF YOU
IN THE CRACKS OF LIGHT I DREAMED OF YOU
She has been swallowed whole by the darkness, and she is sure she bleeds it now.
Shadowed fingers had gripped every thought, every memory, tugging and knotting them until she could no longer follow their tracks. Every thread of sanity stripped until there was nothing left to hold onto, every crevice of light shuttered closed.
Nothing feels real.
Nothing is real.
She remembers seeing her, and seeing him, and remembers that her skin had bruised from where he grabbed her but the darkness was too firmly rooted into her and it swept that away, too. It didn’t want her to have anything to anchor to, knew that its control could only last as long as she was unmoored and aimless.
Nothing is real.
She falls back into the pattern of crafting her own reality, of ignoring when her mind tries to fool her into thinking someone is there. She used to fight it, used to rail against her own mind as the anger licked like flames inside her chest because to constantly be taunted and teased was more than she could bear. Anger was such an unfamiliar emotion to her but she lost herself to it, because set against the darkness it was blinding and bright and it seared some kind of life back into her.
But, as is her nature, she always submitted eventually.
It was easier to let them toy with her.
It was easier to go along with it, to pretend that whoever tried to appear before her was real—their words and their touch, their face and their voice. They were dreams but at least they were her dreams.
And she clings to them because they were all she had, because clinging is what she has always been best at.
It’s why when she sees him—a flash of golden eyes and a jaguar-marked coat she knows better than anything—she is, for a moment, stripped bare. Their eyes lock and she looks at him instead of through him in the way she had grown accustomed, but he is gone faster than she can find the breath to speak. He is gone, but the feeling he evokes doesn’t fade. Desperation and determination, panic and fear—he was here, she was so sure of it, but the darkness that followed her bombarded her, quickly suffocating this light that was trying to break through.
He was real.
He had to be real.
And she is not sure what it is that he leaves behind but she follows it.
She does not know how he found her in this strange in-between, does not know why he didn’t take her with him (because he isn’t real, he isn’t real, none of it is) but she follows him regardless.
Her astral projection and teleportation fight her, reluctant and tired and seemingly unwilling to fight through the barriers that kept her here, but she is so sure that he was real that she is relentless. Even when she can feel herself wearing thin and growing exhausted she sinks herself into the hope that so briefly bubbled in her chest and she drowns herself in it.
It happens seemingly by accident that she stumbles out into a familiar mountain kingdom, and she sucks in a startled breath of pine and wisteria and almost immediately it is stolen from her.
She stands, trembling and wavering, glowing too brightly and stardust cascading from her wings. Somewhere inside her scarred chest a regrown heart is beating too hard and too fast, and panic rings the edges of her nearly black eyes as she searches frantically for the figure she had been chasing.
When she finds him the relief floods every inch of her, crowding the darkness into far corners and reminding her what it feels like to be able to breathe.
“You were real,” she whispers in a kind of disbelief, and she is almost startled at the way her voice sounds back in the reality she had thought was lost forever—it seems loud and harsh, and inwardly she cringes away from it. “I knew you were real,” she continues and though her voice is still breathy and broken this is said with a firm conviction, as if she could look her doubt in the eye and tell it it had been wrong. She doesn’t realize that she has been stepping forward this entire time, that she is now standing directly in front of him and staring into a pair of familiar gold eyes. “Firion,” she stumbles on his name but she presses her nose to her son’s neck with an unshakable certainty, and for the first time in far too long the ground beneath her feels stable.
Shadowed fingers had gripped every thought, every memory, tugging and knotting them until she could no longer follow their tracks. Every thread of sanity stripped until there was nothing left to hold onto, every crevice of light shuttered closed.
Nothing feels real.
Nothing is real.
She remembers seeing her, and seeing him, and remembers that her skin had bruised from where he grabbed her but the darkness was too firmly rooted into her and it swept that away, too. It didn’t want her to have anything to anchor to, knew that its control could only last as long as she was unmoored and aimless.
Nothing is real.
She falls back into the pattern of crafting her own reality, of ignoring when her mind tries to fool her into thinking someone is there. She used to fight it, used to rail against her own mind as the anger licked like flames inside her chest because to constantly be taunted and teased was more than she could bear. Anger was such an unfamiliar emotion to her but she lost herself to it, because set against the darkness it was blinding and bright and it seared some kind of life back into her.
But, as is her nature, she always submitted eventually.
It was easier to let them toy with her.
It was easier to go along with it, to pretend that whoever tried to appear before her was real—their words and their touch, their face and their voice. They were dreams but at least they were her dreams.
And she clings to them because they were all she had, because clinging is what she has always been best at.
It’s why when she sees him—a flash of golden eyes and a jaguar-marked coat she knows better than anything—she is, for a moment, stripped bare. Their eyes lock and she looks at him instead of through him in the way she had grown accustomed, but he is gone faster than she can find the breath to speak. He is gone, but the feeling he evokes doesn’t fade. Desperation and determination, panic and fear—he was here, she was so sure of it, but the darkness that followed her bombarded her, quickly suffocating this light that was trying to break through.
He was real.
He had to be real.
And she is not sure what it is that he leaves behind but she follows it.
She does not know how he found her in this strange in-between, does not know why he didn’t take her with him (because he isn’t real, he isn’t real, none of it is) but she follows him regardless.
Her astral projection and teleportation fight her, reluctant and tired and seemingly unwilling to fight through the barriers that kept her here, but she is so sure that he was real that she is relentless. Even when she can feel herself wearing thin and growing exhausted she sinks herself into the hope that so briefly bubbled in her chest and she drowns herself in it.
It happens seemingly by accident that she stumbles out into a familiar mountain kingdom, and she sucks in a startled breath of pine and wisteria and almost immediately it is stolen from her.
She stands, trembling and wavering, glowing too brightly and stardust cascading from her wings. Somewhere inside her scarred chest a regrown heart is beating too hard and too fast, and panic rings the edges of her nearly black eyes as she searches frantically for the figure she had been chasing.
When she finds him the relief floods every inch of her, crowding the darkness into far corners and reminding her what it feels like to be able to breathe.
“You were real,” she whispers in a kind of disbelief, and she is almost startled at the way her voice sounds back in the reality she had thought was lost forever—it seems loud and harsh, and inwardly she cringes away from it. “I knew you were real,” she continues and though her voice is still breathy and broken this is said with a firm conviction, as if she could look her doubt in the eye and tell it it had been wrong. She doesn’t realize that she has been stepping forward this entire time, that she is now standing directly in front of him and staring into a pair of familiar gold eyes. “Firion,” she stumbles on his name but she presses her nose to her son’s neck with an unshakable certainty, and for the first time in far too long the ground beneath her feels stable.
AND IT WAS REAL ENOUGH TO GET ME THROUGH —
BUT I SWEAR YOU WERE THERE