WHAT IS DEAD AND WHAT WILL LIVE SHARE THE SAME BED.
tomb-cradle: another definition of Stigma.
Maybe this is all residual memory.
Most nights, in my dreams, I am not myself – that is to say, I am not Nicnevin, not this girl, not my newest incarnation. I am Nicnevin. (I am more than Nicnevin.) You are always the life that you are born into, the skin and the face and the form, and you are never quite any of your other selves again. Most of the time, they don’t remain with a clarity that is in any way pure, and trying to remember them is like grasping for something in dirty water; the more you stir it, the more dark and silty it becomes.
It is easiest in dreams, though I don’t remember most of mine. The priestesses say that it is because your body cannot reject your old souls as easily when you are unconscious, and you are less inclined to fight against them. Sometimes I remember them like flickers of light through a canopy. Sometimes, I don’t remember anything at all.
If you ask me what it feels like to die: I would tell you that it is like walking through a door. You are on one side, and then you are on the other; you step over one threshold and into another.
If you ask me what it is like to be dead, or death: I would tell you that the closest I have ever come to either is the form of a blade, and that blood-drinking thing was not quite the same at all.
If you ask me what the girl is like: I would look at the red of her eyes and the wicked point of her horn, which is closer to me than I know that any sharp thing should ever be, and I would say, I don’t know, but she is familiar.
(Maybe, if I knew better, I would say that she is like a doorway, or a threshold, or-)
There is something I want, she says, and the sound of her voice runs a shiver up my spine. I don’t know if it is fear or anticipation, and, more than that, I don’t know why I’m standing still. She hasn’t done anything, but there is something in my stare that tells me, even more than the coil of her horn, that I am in danger. I stand before her, regardless, and something in me wants desperately to know, and I can hear my breath in my mouth and my heart in my ears-
But then she runs.
Her red form strikes through the snow like the opening of a wound, and I almost call her name – and ask her to stay, ask her what she wanted -, but instead my hooves are trained to the ground and frozen, as it were, as the grass beneath.
(I wonder if she knows all the ways that the winter wind, as she leaves, sings with teeth like the blade on the tip of her tail.)
I do not leave until I can no longer see her, and, even when I turn and begin my slow walk back to the court, I cannot quite shake the memory of her eyes from my mind.
@Isolt || <3 <3 <3 | preface of Stigmata, Cixous
"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
