you wouldn't be the first renegade to need somebody
The web keeps breathing, alive and endless and too much all at once. Still seated on the bed, Flora watches Torchline unfurl around her in strange, watercoloured shades—recognisable, but refracted through a dozen other eyes. What was once soft and golden now glows with a hundred competing hues: ochre and rust, silver and teal, rippling as thought after thought joins the tide and the surge of it becomes enormous.
It’s overwhelming, still, but it no longer feels like she’s going to be swept into the void of darkness. She sits up slowly, sheets falling around her legs, her feet slipping to the floor in a quiet brush of skin against fabric. The illusion of water still glimmers dimly on the floor beneath her toes. Jack stands in the middle of it all, crowned in thought like some half-reluctant deity of mind and memory. And Flora, uncharacteristically silent, approaches without a word at first. She lets her hand drift into the space between them, fingers hesitating—hovering—before brushing against his. "It is," she murmurs back, her voice low and soft in the way it only ever is around him. Her eyes track the shifting filaments again, and for once she doesn’t reach to make them pretty. "For so long, it felt like you were short with me. Like your sentences always had these clipped sharp edges and your attention was always somewhere else." She'd thought it meant she wasn't interesting enough to hold his attention.
Wait. Flora blinks, her breath catching; what about all the mageglass she'd given him? The realization hits like a wave through the chest, knocking the wind from her lungs even though she’s still standing. Her hand tightens on his instinctively, her thoughts flashing too bright, too sharp. The glass had amplified magic. Amplified his magic. This whole vast net that never slept, that caught and catalogued and calculated—she hadn’t just fed it, she’d widened it. Strengthened it. Made it worse.
Made him carry even more.
Her breath stutters as the horror roots in her expression, wide-eyed and suddenly fragile. "Jack," she says, her voice a paper-thin thing. "I didn't know."
It’s overwhelming, still, but it no longer feels like she’s going to be swept into the void of darkness. She sits up slowly, sheets falling around her legs, her feet slipping to the floor in a quiet brush of skin against fabric. The illusion of water still glimmers dimly on the floor beneath her toes. Jack stands in the middle of it all, crowned in thought like some half-reluctant deity of mind and memory. And Flora, uncharacteristically silent, approaches without a word at first. She lets her hand drift into the space between them, fingers hesitating—hovering—before brushing against his. "It is," she murmurs back, her voice low and soft in the way it only ever is around him. Her eyes track the shifting filaments again, and for once she doesn’t reach to make them pretty. "For so long, it felt like you were short with me. Like your sentences always had these clipped sharp edges and your attention was always somewhere else." She'd thought it meant she wasn't interesting enough to hold his attention.
Wait. Flora blinks, her breath catching; what about all the mageglass she'd given him? The realization hits like a wave through the chest, knocking the wind from her lungs even though she’s still standing. Her hand tightens on his instinctively, her thoughts flashing too bright, too sharp. The glass had amplified magic. Amplified his magic. This whole vast net that never slept, that caught and catalogued and calculated—she hadn’t just fed it, she’d widened it. Strengthened it. Made it worse.
Made him carry even more.
Her breath stutters as the horror roots in her expression, wide-eyed and suddenly fragile. "Jack," she says, her voice a paper-thin thing. "I didn't know."
