Out on the sand, Kassandra is shaking.
She is shivering in a pit dug by the weight and heft of her body, the grit turned to mud around her, cold night water stinging at her eyes and filling her ears with bubbling. She had dunked her head to clear her thoughts but still the nightmares gripped her, the visions of fire and metal bending outwards from within, bursting with the horrific smell of sulfur. She sees rain in the night but it is blood and severed limbs, organs, ash, and pulverized bone-- it looks so like snow, but it is summer. It is summer?
it is summer, Oculos confirms, sitting nearby. She had been speaking aloud without realizing it. The hound keeps a careful watch on his companion, as he always has; from long nights spent dodging thrashing hooves on silverite silk sheets to snapping at her heels to propel her through the hot death clutch of the desert. Kassandra collapsed in the humid blanket of a summer night on a beach is nothing to him. She seems to be coming out of it, anyway, because her eyes have righted themselves in their sockets and she has unconsciously wiped the spittle from her jaw.
Kassandra swallows hard. Some distance at her back the bonfires burn into the dark, clawing white-hot scrapes at the sky and at the back of her eyelids, but she cannot bring herself to turn and look at them, let alone go to them. Her visions are terrors of the past, the weight of her crimes, all set against the backdrop of the stars spinning in the atmosphere above. These scenes sunder her and leave her with acrid smoke at the back of her throat, but by now, they are familiar-- ghosts with talons raking deep lines across her brain. The truly horrific ones are the unknown, the mysteries; jumbles messages with no sender or a return address that leave her heaving and petrified because somewhere at the edges of her mind there is a pulse, a beat, a liturgy pleading with her to understand and deliver, but she can’t, she can’t, she can’t, and somewhere, someone with a higher power than she can do nothing but bow their head in disappointment and prepare another sequence of images to drop into the muddied puddle of her consciousness and try again.
Kassandra’s psyche is a fragile and crystalline pool and these visions plop in and fall deep; the ripples are cutting shards of glass.
A sigh shakes her midnight form and sets the galaxies stitched into her pelt to dancing. The heat of the moment has passed and now a chill is setting in, despite the warm seasonal temperatures.
stand up out of the wet sand, Oculos says, a suggestion hidden under a command, move around. You’ll come back to yourself faster.
Kassandra lays her tired head down, neck long against the beach. “I suppose I must look rather silly,” she says, quiet, hoarse, and shaky, “sitting out here by myself in the muck.”
Oculos’ long face splits in a wry smile. when have we ever cared?
Humming a note in agreement, Kas pushes herself to stand. The sand lining her underbelly and legs chafes a bit but it feels good to be present. “I’m older now, Ocky,” she states, matter-of-fact and half sorrowful. “I’m supposed to be dignified, not the same, screaming babe locked in the tower.”
don’t you dare say it’s like you never left, Oculos growls. His voice is a mocking imitation of hers. none of this shit is a metaphor, Kas. Stand up and move on, like always.
“Hm. Like always.” There is fear there, the idea that these abhorrent hallucinations will be her forever. It makes her stomach ache, the black pit in her gut mirroring the spaces between the stars. She turns her eyes there, seeking, pleading.
Her Borzoi’s galaxy mottled fur is rustled by a gentle night breeze as he sits silently beside her.
