[AW] the changeling [fire]

[Diana]

NOW, SMITTEN WITH THE CRISIS
of a love who hates her own reflection, / my obsession won't rest.

When he speaks, I watch his face. I watch the smile on his lips as he tells me, easily, that the forest tried to kill him too; and, when his voice dips deep and dark and ill-fitting for his form and he tells me that I shouldn’t avoid the woods, that it can be amazing, too, I find myself upset mostly because I know that he is right.

I want to go beyond that threshold. I want to go into the woods – I want to know what the world is like outside of my desert.

My expression twists, lips going rigid with annoyance. “It’s not the same,” I say, with more than a hint of frustration coloring my voice. “It doesn’t want to kill me like – like a sandwyrm. Or like a bear. Or like a sandstorm, or like a strike of lightning. It wants to kill me like a man. It wants to kill me because it hates me, and it wants to hurt me. Do you understand?” It doesn’t want to kill me because it is hungry. It wants to kill me because it is malevolent, because I am five-hundred years of grudge after wretched grudge made manifest. It wants to hurt me because it would like to hurt my father, but nothing can hurt the sun but itself, the inevitable falling-in of its own mass.

I am – his extension. Always, always, whether I would like to be or not. No one ever asked. Him least of all.

I don’t want to be him, and perhaps that is why I pause, then. “If I…follow you into the woods…do you promise me that you could keep it at bay?” I cast a look past him, into the darkness of the trees, and I feel a chill run up my spine. Mother says that it is foolish to run into the face of danger that you know you can avoid. Still – all the world that I cannot see pulls at me like a magnet. I have always been drawn to things that I know I am not supposed to have, blessings that are not my own.

I do not like the way that he straightens, then, in much the same way that I do not like the mature gleam in his eye. I do not like the confident way that he tells me that he knows how to outsmart the woods, and I do not like the certainty with which he declares to me that nothing stays and everything leaves, eventually – that the entire world and everything in it is always trying to tear you apart from the people that you love the most. I know. I know that. I know that because I’ve seen dead bodies in the Mors, and I know that they had families; I’ve seen dead sandwyrms, and I’ve thought just the same. And – and I am a girl made by a god, and they always prescribe destinies to girls like me.

I have had a sense of inevitability thrust upon my shoulders for as long as I can remember.

Perhaps that is why I look up at him slowly, and, when I meet his eyes, I have regained my composure. “That doesn’t mean that you should be resigned to it,” I say, then. “It only means that you should fight.” Against cruel fates, or against cruel magic, or against cruel men. Against time or space or any other seemingly-impossible force.

My mother spent her entire life giving up what she wanted – what she loved. My brother thinks that what matters is what you are given.

I know that the only thing that matters is the striving.

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@Leonidas || being mean to leo does hurt me, ngl || atwood, "fox/fire song" 

"Speech!"

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