by Tolleson » Fri Mar 06, 2015 9:42 am
Had it been months or mere moments? Together they had fought in the summer glade over the prone body of a boy who only physically resembled the young man beside her now. They had argued, and talked, and danced, they had run over rooftops, destroyed words, the very idea of a thing, and they dared now to break the world in which they stood. It was more than she had ever done with any one person in the real world. Elliot had become her friend, honestly and truly.
If the entire purpose of life was having a passion for just one thing, one driving desire, one love, then the choice was to follow Elliot’s advice or parish from fear induced inaction. Within the span of a quick breath her hand raised too. She might have meant to stop him but as he went for the door’s handle her raised hand fell, covering his. She didn’t stop him; she joined him. It was solidarity.
Here, in the dissolving dark, you suddenly know, as if you have known all along:
The fae had shown her the labyrinth, the wolf, and the sweet, sick, honey-blood of the madman’s mind. It is nothing that words can express, it is an experience like witnessing beauty and tasting terror. Though Zilliah withstood, her mortal mind strained to comprehend, to rationalize, to squeeze the whole of another mind within the space where before only one had fit. And Catch had such a mind, filled with so many foreign memories and irrational conflict. Eventually though, the cracked, rigid confines of her mental capacity eroded like topsoil, easily pushed aside and even he fit. Accomplished only with diligent, deliberate training it had taken years, but space had been made. Tunnels had been carved, great hedge lined labyrinths, the library, halls that looked as Darkenhold, rooms that were Burnie’s office and the Dagger’s common room, the forest, entire beaches and an ocean that stretched as far as imagination. Every space skillfully crafted with what patience and control Rhaena had taught her. The places from her memory were easy to carve, but there were places that didn’t belong to her. Some were the Golben, the tea house, or other places she, herself, had never been. Vast and beautiful, it was a daunting landscape constructed out of necessity and intent, but so often used as a stage for half remembered things where she struggled with reconciling history, reality, and her own experience. It left her questioning; it had crippled her with a helplessness, fear and uncertainty, unable to trust her own senses and memory.
She felt the fear as all Myrkeners do, helplessness in the face of darkness and the inability to protect the people she did care about even when those people had stopped caring for her. But she was also the darkness and within that knowledge a greater, more base and fundamental fear had grown.
It was a fear that surpassed all of the shadows and nightmares, rooted in small seeds such as the memory of receiving a letter from her brother that left her abandoned in the once unfamiliar Myrken. Yet, it was a fear she faced each day, a silent endurance, a steady diligence that left her perpetually alone in the foreign places she herself had built.
Do you see her real strength, the great, quiet capacity to do everything she could in order to maintain a world where nothing changed?
Notions of hope, of love, even the deepest, most hidden and reckless, rage had begun to stir. It was the introduction of Elliot to this mind held in a vice, forcibly repressed and alone. And he wanted to unlock it, to open it; damn the consequence.
When the choice was to take love or lose it forever, her answer came simply.
“I will take it,” a chance, a risk, a willingness to fight, not just defend.
One of her hands he held, the other was held by her. A wild glance up from the knob caught his willful glance and reflected it back, laced with something else, something she had almost forgotten, trust.
“You came upon us as in dream. But I am not dreaming anymore. Elliot, you were an insufferable shit. But you are changed, you have grown, even here, and you are wonderful.”
Before the failing dreamscape crumbed entirely around them she pressed and pulled at the door handle that they might enter together.
“I will bring you back,” leaned in as if on the other side of the door might be a great force, she almost whispered, her tone implying she would do this or die trying.