Like the world had never met her, like the dawn would never come. The dreams there, moving in the darkness. Sleep like smoke abruptly gone, it’s scent lingering on, clinging to the lampshade and the ceiling. Healing like the wounds on an angry fist, knuckles open, splitting every time it mistakes itself for a hand. Bare feet upon the hot, shifting sands. Failing eyes looking up at the stars.
The shoulders shift and slump, an untraceable ache moving through the waning meat, the breath barely reaching the blood. Joints only hurt where you have them. The head full of snakes dragging the unkind architecture that nature has allowed, inflamed nerves and muscles that never mend, the eyes flicker briefly as you descend. Elixirs and potions and a gait like stop motion, a Harryhausen skeleton short the sword and shield. Flick a switch, the librum is unsealed. A light summoned, a light dispatched, a flick of the fingers burned by a match. Something bothered in your breathing, something borrowed in your hair.
She is a feast in a starving world, a famine once she turns her shoulder. Gray as the grave, but so much older. Birthing and bleeding and the gyre ever wider. Dying and living and the old one two. In dreams she is even further gone, no longer in the ensemble or the mood inviolable. Instead masses of harmless monsters grabbing at your heart, easy to shrug off or dance into butter. Strange, dark roads— unfamiliar and well-traveled, her absence only a lack of looking. You come and go, in and not quite of it. The road is unending, the grave as near as a second guess.
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