MABEL
Time was a relative factor, especially for Ascended. It was impossible to tell how long one had lived, through centuries or days, once they’d been taken in by their goddess. And here she didn’t quite understand the confusion, the stillness, the quiet, fingers working through the whorls and tangles, the knots and angles of her hair. “There was a barrier around the Hollowed Grounds.” And for as long as she’d lived – that was all the stories were apart of; trapping, snaring, netting the Voice. And the heralds of the Old Gods too – as if it had been all they could do, taking one with the other. “For three hundred years.” She grew hushed now too, wondering if she could continue further.
Wondering if it was worth it, because something else might fall apart; a sense, a semblance, in the deadening, withering state of the house, in lungs that no longer needed air.
The war. The Voice led. An Order. History repeating, and she realized he must’ve been in some faction of it – before everything came tumbling, tumbling, tumbling down. What would it be like from before, to have lived and seen and watched all of it?
Or none, if he’d been shut down. And why? To spare him the agony? To punish him for not doing, being enough, if the rest were gone? Or were they – were there more of him, nestled and gathered in the Voice’s grasp? The thoughts distracted her from her own demise, from walking in and amongst ghosts and ethers, tracing over the filaments of her tendrils until they seemed mostly free from one another; picked through the rubble, ruin, and wreckage. “Was there truly peace?” A question in the lull, if there had been a time, a place, where everything had been amongst and amidst a repose. “Something is brewing here again,” another murmur, a warning, an emblem of the severity of the mounting situation.
Wondering if it was worth it, because something else might fall apart; a sense, a semblance, in the deadening, withering state of the house, in lungs that no longer needed air.
The war. The Voice led. An Order. History repeating, and she realized he must’ve been in some faction of it – before everything came tumbling, tumbling, tumbling down. What would it be like from before, to have lived and seen and watched all of it?
Or none, if he’d been shut down. And why? To spare him the agony? To punish him for not doing, being enough, if the rest were gone? Or were they – were there more of him, nestled and gathered in the Voice’s grasp? The thoughts distracted her from her own demise, from walking in and amongst ghosts and ethers, tracing over the filaments of her tendrils until they seemed mostly free from one another; picked through the rubble, ruin, and wreckage. “Was there truly peace?” A question in the lull, if there had been a time, a place, where everything had been amongst and amidst a repose. “Something is brewing here again,” another murmur, a warning, an emblem of the severity of the mounting situation.
I bare my teeth
and stretch my claws out
and stretch my claws out
