☼ RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN ☼רות
"you know when you become / something it eats you? the teeth / in my hand. the weight of the handle, / the meat separating from the bone."
"you know when you become / something it eats you? the teeth / in my hand. the weight of the handle, / the meat separating from the bone."
I wonder, as the landscape grows sharper and more unnatural, where I am going – if there is some jagged epicenter to this, which draws everything towards it like the gravitational pull of a dead star. Indeed, the world seems harsher wherever I step, more unnatural. The sea has been out of sight since long before I found myself separated from Ishak, but, closer to the coast (I think; it is so hard to tell where I am and far worse to try and decide where anything else is, relative to me or otherwise), there had been sprigs of greenery and other small, tentative signs of life. Up to a certain point that I passed only moments ago – I think – there had still been persistent scraps of weeds poking up between the shards.
Now, there is nothing but shard. Beneath my hooves, there is a particularly long and unhindered piece, void of the blemishes that mark most of its counterparts. I stare up at myself, unable to shake the feeling of standing on a frozen lake (an impossibility, in Solterra), if the ice could reflect my face back to me. It is almost more unnerving to see the reflection mimic me, like a proper mirror, than it is to see it take on a life of its own; most of the other reflections did, after all.
“Ruth?” He is somewhere nearby, if I can hear him.
The further I go, the more Ishaks I see. At some point, I cross from one shard to the next, and the reflection seems to disappear entirely behind me; for some reason, it makes my teeth grind. I wonder if I am getting close. Surely, for there to be more Ishaks, Ishak himself must be nearby – light can bounce from surface to surface, if it is properly reflective, but it cannot be cast without a source.
This Ishak (unnaturally tall and distorted, stretched out on a too-thin but expansive shard) has far too sweet a smile pressed across his lips (it makes my skin crawl – and gives me the strangest feeling that I am about to take a knife to the ribs) and that Ishak (contained in such a small bit of crystal that I barely notice him among the cascade of other Ruths and Ishaks) has the wrong color of eyes, and those Ishaks (spread out across a spiderweb of cracks) coalesce to form some stitched-together and monstrous imitation of Ishak, each bit and piece that composes his form ripped off from a different Ishak. A Ruth with pale pink blossoms strewn into her mane stares at me with eyes that I recognize, rarely, as my own, and she nods me deeper into the strange expanse of the labyrinth.
Standing amidst a garden of shards is an Ishak. He has more depth to him – more substance. I stand yards away from him, surrounded by the leak of my own reflection. I look him over with a professional eye, analyzing his build, his lack of distortion, the scars on his shoulder and his flank, the cuff that I gave to him. The way he braids his hair. The way he composes himself; the way he would compose himself in this place.
His eyes are on me.
“Ishak?” I press forward, tentatively, through the shattered fisheye of crystal shards. “Is that you?” I approach him, sending ripples of mirror-Ruths cascading out as far as the eye can see; but I am not looking at them, although I can feel their eyes on the back of my neck. I hope that the one with teeth is not among them. (I can see her in my mind’s eye, bloodstained jaws dripping flecks of skin and entrails – more like a snake than I could ever hope to be.)
I finally stop and stare right into the eyes of the Ishak; of my Ishak. (They are shattered ice-blue, like they should be, and they look just as they should.) “You’re- the real one, aren’t you?” My tone suggests far more uncertainty than I actually feel.
Slowly – but not quite hesitantly -, I touch my muzzle to the curve of his shoulder, just to feel if he is flesh and blood, not some stone-crafted mimic.
@
HE FEEDS ME RED MEAT / HE WATCHES THE BLOOD POOL IN MY MOUTHlaughs at my red teeth❂please tag Ruth! contact is encouraged, short of violence
