I'LL BE YOUR SWEETEST MOUTH IF YOU LET ME -
watch me reach down my throat, cut my teeth / on a new name. If you open wide / and swallow deep, you can even forget / the taste of all that blood.
She is not looking at me. Even when she speaks, or I speak - she is looking past me, through me, enraptured, it seems, by the war-wake image on the glossy surface at my back, and, try as I might, I can’t figure out why.
When I saw myself dead - when I turned a corner of jagged mirror-shards reaching up, up, up like brambles from the melted stone of the ground, I did stop in place, for a while. I can’t say that the image shocked me. It didn’t even hurt; not, I think, like it should. Far worse was seeing him what must have been several hours ago, watching the look on his face as he shaved down my bone until it was a sword. When you carve something - do you make it, or do you simply bring out something that was already present? I do not think that I was a sword until he made it of me, until he pleaded me, as it were, back from some dark realm and into the present.
If you have to ask, the girl says, the lovely things are not for you.
“Oh,” I say, and I am unable to hide the disappointment in my tone, “I see.” More accurately - I can’t see, and I find it frustrating. I think that it is a consequence of my numerous past lives that I am possessed by a constant need to know; that, and my immense curiosity about this strange new world. I am always wanting to understand. This is the first time, I think, that I have been told that I fall - inherently - short.
My thoughts cut short because she moves close. So, so close. It’s strange; she is strange. She moves close, and every rampant instinct inside of me screams to run. My vision tunnels on the wicked twine of her horn, which seems so dainty at a glance but comes to such a vicious point. This close, she could, I’m sure, rip open my throat with its slender tip. I don’t move.
I don’t dare reach out to touch her, but, when she breathes out her question, she moves to touch me; her lips brush my cheek, the ghost-press of petals. She gives a sigh, and, though it is as soft as all the rest of her voice, I can feel it in my chest.
“I’m Nicnevin,” I manage, and then add, hesitantly, “and I used to be her.” Is that strange? No stranger, I think, than the rest of this place, I think - and, in spite of my reluctance to divulge too much of my past to perfect strangers, I can’t help but feel a certain sense of wrongness at the idea of disregarding her entirely.
I am not her, and she is not me. I am Nicnevin, and I can no longer remember her name. Regardless - our soul is the same, our deepest core.
My voice comes out quiet and nearly reluctant. “Who are you? Do you know what this place is?” In all the time I’ve spent here, I haven’t thought to ask - and I knew nothing when I came from the mainland. Perhaps there is some reason that it is like this.
Perhaps it is another thing that I cannot know.
@Danaë || <3 || aline dolinh, "unbecoming extraterrestrial"
"Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
