träumend

The sanctified poison worked its way through the substance of my vessel for roughly twenty-four hours: a day of sweltering madness tangled in the sheets of my bed, clutching and crushing them, snaring my own shaking limbs. I panted like a diseased dog, I raved, and memories and dreams blurred together in a single mass of old wounds and hopeless futures. I dreamt failure—defeat—the unending waste of my exile—the meaningless worse-than-nothing that is the Thousand Year Kingdom.

She emerged through my fever, drowsy-gentle Ophélie sitting in my bed. Perfectly beautiful, her wickedness softened by the adoration in her too-knowing verdigris eyes. Ophelos—helpmate. She placed her oasis-cool palm against my forehead to brush back hair streaked with sweat. And I understood that this was a mirage born from my temporary madness, but I longed to weep under her merciful fingers, had my eyes not been baked dry.

I remember her, I dream her as a child. That’s how she sat on my bed, a wild fragile pale-skinned girl, more faerie than mortal, infinitely sweet even at her most vicious. She was bare skin and babymouth, and when I desperately pressed my lips to her fingers, she smelled and tasted as she always did: like manna and ambrosia intermingled with the azoth in her blood.

“Stupid Margrave,” she murmured, a bell-sweet melody of shivering crystal, and my heart faltered, overflowed. To die, to really die, I wouldn’t mind like this. All that I see or seem is but a dream within a dream. “I thought you couldn’t be hurt.”

And I croaked: “Not forever.”