[P] so long as you don't mind a little dying;

[Marisol]

I will follow you down
until the sound of my voice will haunt you

Mari knows this cannot end well. 

She can feel it—the stomach-turning knowledge that all these years of friendship are sliding to what feels like a close, a rock sitting in the pit of her chest, pulling her down to the pits of Hell. It hurts. It hurts in a dull, aching way that promises long-term insistence. It hurts; not like an open cut but like a broken bone, an injury that years from now is still likely to pulse and ache.

Her chest drums with dark-blue pain. A heartbeat twice as large and intense as it should be, beating with tight fists at her chest until it feels sore, and breathing begins to take manual effort. Mari clenches her jaw until it throbs; and her whole face grows numb with the pressure her sharp teeth place on one another to keep back the words that threaten to spill out of her like blood spat from the mouth of a pit fighter.

The world narrows to a pinpoint. Asterion is at the end of a long, long tunnel, and he is fading away faster every second they stare at each other. His features melt into one another. He slips into the background, his eyes blurring into his skin and his skin blurring into the grass, and by the time Marisol blinks—furiously, beating away the sting of salt and wind—she almost can’t remember what he looks like, though he’s standing right in front of her. 

The world narrows to a pinpoint. Abruptly it falls away on either side, shoving Marisol backward, warping into a poorly-made wind tunnel, and she stands frozen into a world distended from its realistic proportions. Mountainous trees. Flowers the size of boulders. Rivers that rise up and arc back to the ground without spilling. What sky is this that stretches into one long streak of blue and white and starshine, that tears the constellations apart at their seams, melts the sun into a pool of ichor?

I was right to believe in you.

Marisol’s heart stops.

Every cell in her body jostles anxiously for attention; but she cannot (and would not) do anything but watch as he disappears, swallowed by the fog like Isra’s boat.

“No, you weren’t,” she mutters, and turns the other way.

“Speaking.”

credits