i see everything;
that is my curse
that is my curse
She’d been convinced, until now, that the island was no stranger than the world around it. (O, a native with a magic that solely spins lies into reality, would know better than anyone.) Even on the mainland there are birds that seem to talk and waves that seem to crack—places where the veil of normalcy seems especially thin, just like here. She’s seen it in the purple pulses of the sky and the creatures buried underneath the sand before.
But this. This is something else.
The island becomes insufferably hot in the middle of the day, when the sun is at its highest and the humidity gathers in the sky like cotton; O has become accustomed to a routine which involves hiding out in the cold-dark of the jungle from the moment that infuriating star hits midday to when it dips below the horizon. Today is no different. Since noon she’s lain panting in the cool foliage, one eye cracked lazily open to observe the flashes of bird-wings and swirling flocks of butterflies as they pas overhead. Some of them she recognizes and has even started to categorize: every time she sees a new streak of fluorescence or patterns of dots like so many eyes, she writes it down in the back of her head.
It is far more peaceful here than at home—even counting the strange, toothy jungle cats and tales of skeletons lining the caves—and O is not planning on leaving anytime soon. (As long as she is away from Solterra there’s no reason to think about its ruin. No reason to think about her mother. No reason to worry about Caine. Or Elif. No reason. And she has been trying very hard to become a creature of reason.) No, she’s content with this new life of ritual, spending her days asleep under the waving palm trees and her nights exploring the luminescent shores.
And, if her timing is right, it should be nightfall just about now.
With a little huff, Apolonia climbs to her feet. She shakes her narrow head and a shower of leaves and dirt cascades to the ground, pooling around her feet, growing bigger and bigger as she untangles the twigs from her hair and rolls the knots out of her shoulders. It feels like being reborn, sort of. When she’s reasonably clean she starts to weave toward the alcove she’s been exploring. It’s only a mile or two from the sleeping imprint she left in the foliage. The island is becoming familiar to her now, and she picks her way through the jungle humming a little tune under her breath. Something about stars she heard as a kid, the notes jumping up and down in a sine wave: the sound is lonely in the jungle, the only marker of organized thought for miles around. Loneliness has not quite set in. She trots through the jungle with a blank head and a song on her lips, too distracted to worry about the warmth that starts to seep into her skin or the fact that the trees are utterly empty around her. The sound of her voice and the axe-weight at her hip assures her that it’s all still safe.
Until she emerges from the trees.
A pulse of blazing light sears down, splits her head in two with an excruciating noise that O realizes is coming from her own mouth, something between a squeak and a howl. She ducks her head back toward her shoulder, blinking furiously, trying to pull the hot-white world back into focus, but it only comes in gossamer flickers, a little bit at a time and not nearly satisfying. The landscape is washed out into shades of white, all the green and blue leached away, an unrecognizable abstraction of what once was a tropic. The air blazes with heat, so intense it shimmers visibly over the ocean. “No.” O barely hears her own voice—pure, disembodied shook. Overhead, when she finally does manage to look up, the sun hovers mockingly in the exact same place she left it this morning.
Suddenly the axe’s promise seems frail.
STAFF EDIT***
@Apoloniahas rolled a 3! She has been awarded +150 signos.
