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[P] like constellations - Printable Version

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like constellations - Nicnevin - 09-15-2020



IN A STORY, 
a girl is a tree / is a bird / is a wilderness


I am beginning to think that I might be lost.

These passages all look the same, or else unrecognizable, and I can no longer hear the lash of the sea against the coast. I think that I am standing in an impact wound; the shards of mirror-like substance stretch up and arch over my head like a ribcage, each jagged and precarious edge like a cut-out against the darkening blue of the sky. They reflect the image of branches, a canopy of leaves that is nearly familiar – I can almost place where it is in the Gold, or where it was, lifetimes ago. They are like fire above my head, a pattern of reds and yellows and oranges of an impossible, burning richness; I only spent half of the autumn season in this land of “Novus,” but I am sure that none of the trees could display such beautiful, vibrant colors. I used to think that they were normal, but now-

I suppose they were more special than I thought. I’ve felt that way about a lot of things, lately, and with each life and death. I don’t really miss most of them, though. Not yet.

(I think that I probably will; but it isn’t as though I’ve left forever. I’ve only left long enough to find the heir – and surely I will miss this place, too, once I return. What I have come to realize, after life after life after life, is that life is a slow-growing composition of things that you’ll come to miss, whether you know it at the time or not.)

I keep walking. There are fantastical images scrawled on the mirror-like walls of shard; the further I am from them, the less that they seem to reflect anything I know, and the more that they seem to reflect things that I can barely put words to. Great balls of fire and ice against a void of black. A deer with wings in the place of eyes, bounding alongside me at a distance, each movement like my reflection. A fish upside-down in the water, with a mouth full of wolf’s teeth. I don’t know much, in this labyrinthian expanse of unfamiliar images, but what I do know is that it is growing colder, and darker, and more bizarre with each passing moment. I wonder what this place will be like when night falls. (I wonder if I really want to know.)

During the day, it was easy to distinguish the shards from reality. When night falls, it becomes much, much harder. I am forced to learn this by experience – when the sky grows black and starless, I can no longer tell if the lights I see in the distance are some strange reflections or people with lanterns or will'o'wisps or the gleaming eyes of large, unseen monsters, or if the trees I see are real or only the image of trees, or if the splash of blood on the ground only a few feet away from me is on the mirror or beneath its surface. Worst of all, the images begin to seem depthless, less like reflections than doorways, and, so, when I reach the reflection of a bridge, I keep walking, but it’s not a bridge at all, and the reflection was-

Below. I’m falling, suddenly, down into a narrow abyss, and I only barely catch myself, wings snapping out to support me at the last moment. I don’t think that I would have stayed down there, but, beneath my hooves, I find myself looking at my first face – and directly across from me, staring out from another mirror and lit low by lights I recognize as fireflies and the lanterns that they hung in the trees during New Year’s festivals, I see someone that I can no longer put a name to.

It’s cold, and dark, and I don’t know where else to go, so, after a moment of hesitation, the familiar sight of him sends me trotting up to the mirror, hooves clicking against the flawless surface of the mirror below my hooves. (It is clear and dark, like the surface of a lake at night; I feel like I could fall through it.) He watches me approach, and I can’t help but find it strange that I can’t place his expression. “You know,” I say, as I step close enough to lean forward and press my forehead to the image’s shoulder, “it’s really frustrating that I can’t remember your name.” It feels cold and hard and smooth like stone, not warm like skin – and I know that I should have expected it.

He turns his head; looks me over. The golden laurels in his hair catch like bits of flame in the lantern-light. “Should I stay here until the morning, you think?” I certainly think that he is less likely to do anything to me than most of the other reflections I’ve seen, and I can’t tell where the line lies between image and reality for any of them. Predictably, he doesn’t say a word. I’ve never heard any of them speak, though I feel like they should be able to. I roll my eyes, which is probably unreasonable, and take a step back. “You were much better at giving advice the last time we met…”

The only response I am given is the howl of the wind through the gorge. I shiver, and press my wings a bit tighter to my sides.
 



@Andromeda || I'm glad we have a thread again <3 || emily skaja, "rules for a body coming out of the water"
"Speech!" 




@



RE: like constellations - Andromeda - 10-26-2020


you spend so many nights dreaming of spilling your blood to the moonlight. slipping out of your bones, and slithering into the soul of someone else


I am lost in a hallway of mirrors.  This place feels like a dream, where the line between reality and fantasy is thinning, like songs, like whispers.  Night falls like a seedy whisper over the greying horizons – the cresent moon, a porcelain grin, flows down in streams of haunting light, that has forgotten how to love flesh and skin and lives only in the deadness of a dream world.  Their moonlight follows me from high up above, as I walk through these desolate hallways with a sigh of awe and endless wonder upon my lips.  Reflections stir before me. Reflections gleam and ripple like autumnal witchcraft.  Light cracks like iron against marble, and something unholy snarls through the darkness and inbetween the false-trees made of silver illumination and haunting poetry.  

Sharp moonbeams suddenly twist between dark mirror-trees – wolves run alongside me, and I can hear their feral melody echo with the shrills of their frightening hunger.  I watch the wolves run past me like starved shadows and a chill runs up my spine by the billowing memory of their winter call. Their beauty runs past me in a wicked blur of divine terror; their mirror-fangs like snarling embers in a darkness made more of fire and smoke, than starlight and nightsky.  I watch them run, baying wildly as their forms disappear through nightsmoke, dancing in a wave of ash –  grey, and fading.  Their cries were drowned out before a full moon made of silver desire. I am walking through a black forest made of starlight and quicksilver wishes, now.  Everywhere I look, I see a midnight dream staring back me.  It is haunting, ephemeral.

In the mirror, I am nothing more than a ghost, a fragmenting mist of holy, burning light. I see that I am walking on water.  I see that I am floating upon the clouds that linger above the sea – clouds that bank low the restless tide and kiss the surface of the ocean with every breath I take.  Each step I make echoes back with siren clarity, as the water laps my feet and beg me to drown.  Suddenly, I fall –  I fall.  The clouds part at my feet and I fall into the darkness of the ocean beneath me.  I sink to the ocean-floor and my world, my reflection, my mirror-self explodes into a burning inferno of pale, drowning moonlight.  As I turn away from the violent image, a tear threatens to spill from my cheek, yet even I have forgotten how to cry.  I cannot bear to look at my mirror-self, to see how I lay like a broken swan upon the ocean-floor – a frail ghost, trapped beneath the seas' wreckage, whose voice comes out not in a plea – but a shrill scream.


The echo of that silent scream, dances like firelight against shattered window.  She stands before the nightmarish vision, startled.  Andromeda shivers before the disappearing image of her lifeless reflection –  an angel wounded by her sins.  Starlight washes over her lithe physique, her fiery curves touched by a sceptre-glow made soft and silver – radiant and illuminating as the December moon. Moonlight cracks over the mirrors' lightening surfaces, and bounces back like halos strewn from the brows of archangels.  Darkness now settles in the island-forest made of bones and blood and mirrors.  Andromeda stumbles backward as her heart begins to stir with restlessness, and unease.  She leaves it all behind her, and along another moonlit path – with the breeze descending her curves and the night braiding her hair – Andromeda gasps softly, as she spies a winged girl captivated by the same labyrinthine reflections. 

She is tall, elegantly sculpted, with dark, beautiful skin the shade of autumnal fire and burning embers – her eyes were dual-hued, mysterious, whilst an oak-shaped leaf adorned her swarthy brow. Andromeda's voice falls in a soft cadence, a hushed song of gentle words, as she intends to catch the fae's attention with a whisper of relief (relief, that she is not alone in this darkness); "Are you lost, too?"

@Nicnevin


you're the dawn that rises bloody, and wrecks ships in its wake.  but you're a siren too, somewhere deep in the aching heart of you