from here, only void }{ maya's death

One moment I'm there, the next I'm not.

The transportation between each location: life and death is too fast for me to feel any pain. All I have is a pool of blood leaking from a hole in my face, my threads woven from the fibres of stars being yanked out from their security, one by one with no sorrow or remorse. I didn't think that death would be like this, I was hoping it'd be something harmonic and beautiful, dying with the familiar family faces around you as you exhale your last breath as the wind whistles through the cracks in your window frame and then you just--

--die.

There is no ache, no eternal heartbreak or thick pain. It's the same feeling you learn to become immune to when you tell yourself that youcandothis, with your positive yet diminishing attitude. Time takes it toll on my body as I lie here, lifeless and alone. I'm cold and shattered: brittle bones coming together to create one final masterpiece; yet it isn't considered art.

My fingers peel away with the ominous tone of my waning heartbeat. Porcelain through and through: I feel the lightest of weights as my retribution comes like a hurricane. I feel as if in the sky, soaring like in the eye of a child immersed in a story, yet my feet are too grounded on this world. My fleeting imagination draws the remainder of my strength from within me, weeping from my pores like tears touched by the sea.

I tell myself 'I'm fine'.

My weakened castle composed of hopes and dreams, whimsical wishes and love tied together by the burning strings catches me as the bricks fall and tumble to the ground. I count them all like each of my losses, dust inhaled into my dishonoured body as I drown into the things I once knew.

---

It's a strange sensation on my head, against my rusting cheeks as I become limp with cascading shades of bitter white. Their touch is too close and real to be crafted by a dream, but their skin lacks the warmth it once held that provided me with the protection and place to call home.

Now, a rotten stench of blood and homesickness was the only thing with the ability to wash away the harshest dare of them all: death itself.

Family always was important to me, and now I am have left them, I feel replaced by a dead name. Etched faces carved by angels only to be torn like simple paper as they fade from my view and a knife slaughters the remnants of glasses, broken with fear and false hope.

To haunt them for lifetimes to come seems only erroneous. Though now, I am a ghost of nothing but past and whispered cries, the eerie responsibility of being there, with them, after all of this

seems nothing but

wrong.

And I wish that I could have spent more time with them, just like we all do. But this genie's lamp has been sculpted by the hands of a idiosyncratic fallen angel who lacks the heart which comes with the gaining of their wings.

The tarnished gold can't grant me any wishes, it just forces my imagination to splurge out from within. A book of half finished creations and ideas, a mess of couldhavebeens and shouldhavebeens remind that it was too soon to say goodbye.

Too soon to march onwards from this world to stand like soldiers at the gate of another.

And though we may wish for the world to stop for just a second or two for our own sake, for life's sake, the distress and desolation causes us to only fall into the depths of a timeless planet discovered only by those who have experienced the coldest of truths.

The hunger for the growth of wings on our back to lift us from the hell beneath us causes us to call for the help of another: reliance of a friend to join the adventure.

And though the journey barbaric, the handshake offered by a light too bright for description makes up for all the loss and sadness and death of hopes and dreams and leaves us renew and reborn.

But we're blind.

So there are no adventures any more, just words sharpened to become weapons which slither from the cave of a mouth like snakes searching for a secret to fulfil their thirsty stomachs.

There are no adventures, just vulnerability.

Yet we've just finished embarking on one of the greatest to ever be created: life.

And this is where it leaves us standing.

Air made from a concoction of metal, rust and ground dirt which reaps our beings like falling leaves from an autumnal tree, snapping polaroid pictures of them only to burn them like boxes of memories which only cause too much hurt

which only cause too much--

--pain.

There's only one type of pain felt in death, oozing from the crevices caused by a broken heart. 

I'll miss them all.

A river of strangers flowing past me which I lie oblivious to. I wish I could have plummeted into the water and drowned myself into them, touching them, meeting them, feeling them just to know what the opposite of loneliness was like.

In my time in the arena, I had just that: the opposite. Sue and Wyatt and Maya and Noah, boys meet girl. Their names beat with the last few drums of my heart because I want them to understand me the way I wish they could have. 

Though they may have stolen the heart of Elya Johnwayne and the mutt we fought on the second day and the clockwork soul of the Cornucopia, the most important they stole was my own. 

Why?

Because they were the strings to my own puppet body, the blood through my cardboard veins.

The momentous memories I created with them feel frozen in the time they were made. The time which we had counted in this Hell counted on fingers less than five, but fingers once alive.

We could have grown old together and forged a chorus of melodies between our palms like our innocent faces before this fiasco.

Murderers however, do not sing.

As the silence pierced into our ears dawns into the indigo, violet, blue and pink skies: it is long-lasting and sweet. A hushed pulse felt in the place where my eye once was continues like a band on a sinking ship, time sinking into the oceans of restlessness and forgotten friendship and enemies alike. I can't afford to loosen my grip on life as I know it when the invisible stars above smile down onto me like a parent full of pride.

Their light fades into view,

whisking me away

into a coffin of forbidden sights and smashed orbs.

Silence channelled, washing away the pieces of pain which try to cause the hurt in my skull and chest and arms and legs.

It's a peaceful feeling yet shards of brutality find their way into the mixture. 

---

The product of a one night stand back in nine lies on the mattress, content with the comfort of her deathbed. A window to my right, a river to my left: life still feels real enough for me to feel happy.

White closes down onto me,

choking me,

suffocating me,

until the boom of a cannon from another world sends me soaring into the ashes of another.

I came into this world as a gift to a mother, a distant father and as a shoulder for those to come. I leave with a legacy in my shadow, Maya Xiaoqing, a name written with emotion inflicted and fires breathed with each and every breath.

Faces move and hearts pace around made from reinforced paper: pure white, soft and gentle

but strengthened by numbers, strengthened by their own kind.

Footsteps gone and hands of clocks dissolving into the skies.

Death was an awfully great adventure.

But my life was a story of its own.