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She looked at the wooded, quick-sloping monstrosity beyond the lake as he told her who he thought she was, what he'd seen in their brief (yet unbelievably private) meetings. The ground was thick with soggy branches, decaying pine needles, and brambly green bushes. There are paths covering the land like one large spider web. The paths twirl in and out of groups of pine trees that sprout tall and thin, their stubbly needles providing a lace of shade from another unbearable day, but they stood in the rain, embracing all that the Rift threw at them. She looked for signs of any 'normal' seasons (like how things wer back in Helovia) approaching, instead of simply wet, dry, or freezing, but none of the non-evergreens showed hints of an approaching fall, spring, summer, or winter: Their still-green leaves were only drooping now due to the heavy and seemingly constant rain. The rain fell in a furious torrent, like the gods (if there were any) were mad and wanted to flood all life out, something that she had thought the Rift was trying to do since the moment she stepped onto the sentient ground. Day after night, night after day, it rained. It poured. The skies never stopped weeping. It poured so hard that she couldn’t see ten feet in front of her at times, so that the lakes swelled up and lapped against the trees, swallowing half of the Rift in water. They all walked around in a perpetual state of wetness. Everything tasted of rainwater and mildew and dampness. Not one thing in this dreaded world was dry today. It was impossible.
In this world, where the rain was more of a danger than anything else, everything felt wrong. The sun was always too hot or nonexistent. The ground either burned or flooded or froze. The sky remained perpetually cloudy when all she wanted was a drop of sunlight. On the flip side, when she wanted a break from the heat, there was not a single cloud in the sky. Everything about this land worked in extremes. Where there should be just a simple breeze was a tornado, a rainshower escalates into a tsunami, a sprinkling of snow forms an avalanche. In this world where everything is so unequivocatly fucked up, he was a fresh of breath air. She did not know him well enough to love him, hardly enough to even like him. It still felt good though. In many ways it also felt right.
He doesn't answer her question, but instead forms another. She stops moving towards him, standing a short ways away from him. If he stretched his mouth outwards, her could bite the soft skin between her nostrils. She could do the same. She listened calmly as her spoke of her, her eyes dancing from the ground to his bloody body to the trees to the rain to his eyes. She ignores the bulk of what he says, aknowledging it fully, but not responding to it. After he finishes, she waits a moment before speaking. "And what is it I desire?"
If he thought he knew her, let him guess what she seeks. He'd been mostly right about everything he had said, but these were just observations that many make about her. Fire and fury. Passion and pride. Love and loss. Unpredicatbility and unapologetic. These were her labels, and he'd focused on the first one- fire and fury. It was the most accurate, true, but there were so many layers to her soul that one assumption of her was never fully correct. She could not be condensed into one- not even two or three, labels.
"What is it," she begins curiously, "you desire?" At this point, she had the nagging feeling he knew more about her than she did him. She would like to think she could throw eloquent words together to describe him like he did her, but she really couldn't. From what she'd seen, he was inexplainable. He was just as much of a puzzle as she was. They were intricate, complex, fomidable beings with walls built around their minds and souls, their hearts clad with stone, their lives a game of cat and mouse. Alas, despite their complexities, they were here, alive and breathing and speaking and living.
like a deer in the headlights i meet my fate |
Siren's Summit
