mortem obire . tex
Jun 29, 2022 20:23:03 GMT -5
Post by pogue on Jun 29, 2022 20:23:03 GMT -5
T E X
"I'll be back by nightfall." He says to his allies, such sureness laced into the words. It's almost enough to fool himself, the way they fall to the ground so easily
It's only when he's partially up the mountain, viewpoint expanded, horizon dimming and the air thinning that he feels his entire world turn upside down, shattered glass twisting and turning in the air and leaving him with nothing but a broken piece of his own soul, drifting helplessly in the void and waiting to disintegrate. His body has been on high since he's stepped off the pedestal and into the Bloodbath, nothing but the soft glow of the Tavern light as his guide and nothing but a trail of blood as his warning.
Now, as feet too weary and muscles too strained press into the rocky side of the mountain his adrenaline begins to run thin, replacing his own blood and seeping from wounds both shallow and deep, a trail of his own mortality written in between the lines and carved into the ground beneath him as he walks.
Or, more stumbles, because there's an inexplicable word that slips from his lips when his ankle hits the rock at a crude angle and his leg buckles beneath the dead weight of his body, palms slamming into the mountain face as he stumbles to catch on and stop himself from tumbling down the rock. It leaves him twisted up, gut sinking and breath caught in his lungs and pain flaring up from the source as he feels the gash in his back suddenly reopen, stitches snapping from the sudden momentum with muscle and flesh pulling apart at the seams.
It takes what's left of his strength to twist his body and land flat on his ass, gasping from the sudden pain and feeling the gravel and dust rise and settle underneath his weight. Gaze shifts, brown eyes rising from the darkened veins of the mountain's edge and up to the setting sun, bleeding out into the horizon and a thousand shadows dancing across the landscape in the wake of its fall.
Time begins to do that thing again, stretching itself out and twisting into something sinister just like it did after the Bloodbath, carving into his veins and his heart and ripping them to shreds until there's nothing left. He loses track of it, feels it slip through his grasp like the sands on the rock side, grinds his teeth just to feel the pain.
It's only when a tear carves into the flesh of his cheek that he's pulled back to the reality at hand, blinks once then twice just so that the water in his eyes will blur the landscape of his own coffin.
After a second his vision clears.
He sniffles, then tells himself he's only crying from the pain.
His own mortality stares back at him, unrelenting and cold and everything in between as he nearly chokes trying to swallow down whats left of the spit in his mouth. It's in the quiet moments, the somber ones, that he feels his own memories tug and pull at his thoughts until there's nothing else he can focus on. Bubbling up from the source of the cold voids of his heart are the things he had no choice to repress, ghosts that hid in the shadows until he finally joined the shadows as well, one sibling lost to the ice of the winter and another to the ice of a slowing heart.
Silver linings, he tries so hard to find them just like so many times before, biting at his own grief and trying to forget the way his mind has carved his own Brother's face into his memories, cemented it and let it rot in the forefront of his mind, the way it did the same thing seventeen years later with his sister. There are holes in his heart the size of Twelve, fiery and burning and carving into the rot that has sat there for years on end. The district had made it easy to attempt to forget, to move on just to keep yourself from following in their footsteps.
Now as he sits in silence and feels it consume him, drawn out and slow and ever painful he can feel the memories and the ghosts attached crawl and carve at his own flesh, brother and sister and the empty spaces they left burning him from the inside out. He wonders what he looks like to the citizens at home now, if the camera is focusing on brown irises as he tears up again, if they can see the people they lost and the people they chose to forget written in his image like he does every time he looks in the mirrors.
Instinctual, he can't dwell on it, chooses to move instead of sit still long enough for it to take him under, groans and gasps in pain as he pulls himself to his feet and looks back up the mountain, preparing himself to keep climbing.
And he can't help but think, futile as it is.
Their ghosts won't follow him.
He doesn't dare look at the reflection staring back at him from the steel of his weapon,
too afraid to prove himself wrong.
