thousand times I've fallen

KIADA you kneel and say your prayers with shaking hands and a mouth full of metal but the blood in your mouth tastes nothing She’s writing, the quill moving across the parchment in easy strokes, before suddenly she can feel what he’s sending down the bond. Whether or not it’s intentional doesn’t matter to her, not as she hears the creature on the bed shudder and gasp, as the shock of the pain reaches her like shooting daggers so forcefully that the quill drags across the paper in a sharp line and she flinches. It’s a yawning void she knows all too well herself, and she thinks of all of those that she’s lost, of all of those that are a portal away, so far from her. She misses them, misses everyone and everything as a tether – that yawning void growing in her too. And she has to turn away from him to hide away the burning in her eyes, the pain that she’d share with him if she could, but knows he doesn’t need. Of lost siblings, of a lost and presumed dead twin, of everything. So she puts the quill away, back into the ink pot, before she instructs Auni to keep an eye on him and she slips out of the room for a break. nothing, like holy wine as it drips from your tongue during confession and your hail mary feels h o l l o w in the face of all that r e d