[eysuria] eternity in his touch
Title: Eternity In His Touch
Genre: Fantasy - Eysuria
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,400
This was intended to be for another RCR challenge, which was based off of a fifty sentences challenge on some LJ community. Basically you are given fifty one-word prompts and you write a sentence response to each which embodies the meaning of the word. I got to 35 sentences and realized the story was done, so I didn’t enter the challenge with it, but I did like the result. Be warned: long, convoluted sentences (like I used to write regularly!).
#01 - Ring
It is an eternal instant; his touch sparks an electric collision of our souls, and suddenly I can see it all come full circle--me pushing him away (every him there ever was or will be) out of terror that he does not love me, restructuring the world to distract myself from the hollow ache, reuniting with him and burning with the betrayal in his eyes, and dying just to wake into the cycle anew.
#02 - Hero
This is my savior: he is my almost-mirror, an amalgam of something just more than three souls fighting to align themselves into one heart, and each one of them loving me (or one of the souls that is Aerlun-Braden-Eivyr) enough to follow me through incarnation after incarnation in a desperately blind attempt to save me from the cycle that I forced myself into by betraying him and running from the pain I didn’t want to admit I caused in the first place.
#03 - Memory
If I let go, if I allow the force ignited by our touch to guide my soul through its course--well, I’m not sure where I’ll end, but I know I’ll begin in rewalking all the steps that got us to this place: mine and his.
#04 - Box
I am Daemien; it is a memory that wasn’t mine, but now it is ours, and so the claustrophic feeling of being locked in Casella’s closet as punishment for not being her personal thief and spy is real enough that I can feel the brick and the wood grain on every side pressing against my own skin.
#05 - Run
By the time Daemien finally escaped Casella, he was tired of running; it took three attempts, and each brought him closer to giving up all hope--the first time, when he could do nothing but watch as a small clan of his own kind was murdered by spirit wraiths, just as his family had been; the second time, when the friend who agreed to take him on as an apprentice died in such a way that he couldn’t help but suspect Casella’s involvement; and the third time, when he did escape, but he ended up enslaved for a crime he didn’t commit.
#06 - Hurricane
He remembers (and so I remember) our meeting and first romance as a storm; like many storms, it started with a rumble of thunder, raged at full fury for a time, and then spiraled into little but an echo in the air with destruction left in its wake.
#07 - Wings
His memories of being Lydon are more painful, since there are no memories of happiness between me and Daemien; we share memories of Lydon and Braden’s brief summer of bliss in the same way that we share each other’s memories now, because we came into their souls after almost all the love--all the flutter of butterflies in the stomach, all the floating feelings of romance--was gone.
#08 - Cold
A memory I don’t want to experience, but I force myself to anyway: I am him when he was Lydon, and I hold the still, dead body of Triel in my arms, grieving intensely and cursing the woman who killed him (a woman hired by me, and so this terrible emptiness that Lydon and now I feel, it was my fault).
#09 - Red
There is the sickening swell of blood that runs down black skin and torn, dirty clothes--I see it through Lydon’s eyes, but it is mine (or Braden’s?), and for the first time I feel the intense pain it caused Lydon to see me take my own life even though he thought he was beyond feeling anything but hatred for me.
#10 - Drink
Apricot’s memory of meeting Eivyr is nostalgic; through him, I find myself across the illoki seeing pool from Eivyr before I ever awoke in him, watching with fascination the black-skinned stranger so brazen as to drink from such a sacred pool of water.
#11 - Midnight
Apricot and Eivyr’s romance before I woke was even briefer than Lydon and Braden’s, like a sunset before the black of night; quickly the deepest hour of darkness arrived, when I was at my worst conquering Apricot’s world, and the terror he felt (and I feel too) knowing that I was coming to torture the power from his body aches too sharply to be just memory.
#12 - Temptation
When Daemien came to Apricot in the decaying form of Lydon’s body--the sensation of being in Apricot’s mind at this moment is most jarring, and it aches, but my own feelings echo his perfectly--the choice Daemien gave him to make was a burning coal in his stomach; Eivyr and I were distinctly separate in his mind, and though the tiniest hope of saving Eivyr from what I made him become was almost unbearably enticing, he was also terrified of facing me and even a little uncertain whether saving Eivyr was the right thing to do if it meant saving me too.
#13 - View
The vision Apricot brought to the amalgam of Daemien-Lydon-Apricot was sharp and new; he opened them to the possibility of taking a new body without ripping the soul from it first as spirit wraiths do, allowing their combined soul to remain anchored in Apricot’s body as it had not been in Daemien’s or Lydon’s, and suddenly the thought of meeting me face-to-face was not a desperate but ultimately doomed final resort.
#14 - Music
He came face-to-face with me for the first time since he’d become more than one soul, and rather than being pulled into the magnetic whirlwind around me and lost into eternity as he feared, he stood against me, fought me, spoke the words he’d ached to say to me for more than a lifetime--and finally touched me in an explosion of harmony, spiraling outward before beginning to implode back into ourselves.
#15 - Silk
As the explosion pulls back inward, Daemien begins to remember with me: he feels what it was to be naïve among the Whips on a more basic level than even Lydon and Braden were a lifetime later, and what it was like to fall in love with the handler who saved me from my first brush with slavery--Silk, who cared for no one but had the open face of a kinder man, and who created the first fissure in my heart, one that grew with each successive betrayal (lovers’ betrayals of me, but my betrayals of them at least as often).
#16 - Cover
Silk used me, and when I grew tired of being used, he tried to cover his involvement in his own clandestine missions by pinning them on me; it didn’t work, but we were exiled together, and we fought on the ship to the Black Coast--he ended up in the river, and I ended up in a collar for murder, and it very nearly broke me (though if it had, maybe that would have been a better fate for all involved).
#17 - Promise
Daemien echoes the wordless promise he made in befriending me and bringing me back from the brink of self-destruction (the first time, at least) when we met in collars together: you deserve your name, you deserve to live, you deserve freedom, you are worth saving, and most of all you are worth loving.
#18 - Dream
My hopeful vision of what the world could be back then is a nightmare in retrospect--maybe not in the way I saw it originally, but in what it did to the world when I tried to bring it to pass.
#19 - Candle
Together Daemien and I freed first ourselves, then the slaves of our masters’ household, then the slaves of Brevel, and eventually the slaves of the entire empire; the flickering light of our dream of freedom spread like wildfire, and soon destroyed in just the same way.
#20 - Talent
Daemien saw through the idyllic picture of what could be to what was becoming eventually, but my usual knack for understanding what went on around me failed me then; I had too much faith in that ability, so much that I didn’t trust it when Daemien began to tell me that the direction we were headed was wrong, that we were just turning the hatred leveled against us back around and wielding it at a new target rather than eliminating it.
#21 - Silence
Remembering, I can recognize the point when Daemien stopped protesting, stopped speaking much to me at all, because he realized that I was too much in the grip of hatred, power, and Lyss’ influence to listen; it hurts us both to remember, especially since each of us finally understands fully how the other felt, and we each feel we gave up on the other for a time.
#22 - Journey
Maybe this is where our chase through the ages truly started: I swore I trusted Daemien, but Lyss had me questioning him at the end, and Daemien swore he would never give up on me, but the vision the spirit wraith gave him of what I could do to the world combined with my refusal to listen to his pleas finally convinced him that the only way to stop me might be for me to die.
#23 - Fire
My first death burned: the poison was acid eating away at my veins and I knew I was dying, and I knew the magic Lyss made me work would bring me back in the next generation, but I didn’t want that anymore--Lyss was right, Daemien allowed me to die, he held me and rocked me crying into oblivion--my soul was ripped into the current of Consciousness that it almost touched in life and the onrush of everything (other souls, life, magic, the endless expanse of time in all directions) seared through me but never numbed, never, until the magic wove me into a new body.
#24 - Strength
Waking in Braden’s body was agony because his past so mirrored my own; the sudden memories that had been his but were now my own tortured me with my own mistakes done over, and I struggled to break away, because I could not endure the betrayal again--but I found strength in the determination to shield myself from the coming betrayal by shoving Lydon away before he could show he didn’t love Braden-me after all.
#25 - Mask
I hid all the pain away behind a façade, insulating myself from everyone and seeking to continue the work I started before my first death mainly as a distraction from the feelings I’d buried deep inside--but they were closer to the surface than I ever imagined, and when I saw Lydon, I couldn’t contain them anymore, and the pain of betraying him broke me down.
#26 - Ice
So when I woke in Eivyr’s body, I thought I was prepared; I forced my heart to turn cold, and I pushed Apricot away (it wasn’t hard, Eivyr’s people pushed him away for me), and when conquering the surrounding kingdoms brought me to the ‘need’ to torture Apricot for the power he guarded, I vowed not to lay eyes on him until the very end so that maybe I could resist the pain I suspected lay waiting even more powerful than the lifetime before.
#27 - Fall
I wasn’t strong enough to resist when my guards told me that Apricot demanded that I face him, and so they brought him before me; though I tried to steel myself against it, my world plummeted around his bleeding form, and perhaps it was that weakness that opened the door to my salvation.
#28 - Forgotten
I did manage to fight him for a time, but when I drew fresh blood and saw it trace rivulets through the sand and dried blood on his skin, I forgot all the reasons I had for justifying his torture and death, and could only feel the ache that bloomed in my chest for causing him more pain.
#29 - Dance
The force of our touch spirals inward and spins lazy circles around our cores, forming a band of light between us and around us; it connects us like eshari dancers’ ribbons, but it encloses our entire forms rather than just our waists.
#30 - Body
The brilliant image of light fades and leaves us in our separate bodies--I can still feel it there, connecting us to one another, and I realize that we have always been connected in a more tenuous way, but this new connection is powerful and permanent.
#31 - Sacred
Alone in my own body, the flurry of memories and feelings dwindles to just two: a blinding feeling of guilt for everything I’ve done to Daemien, Lydon, and Apricot as well as to the rest of the world, and an incredible sense that this amalgam of my three lovers (do I call him Daemien? Lydon? Apricot?) is nothing short of a saint in his willingness to follow me through as many incarnations as it took to reach out to me at a time when I was finally open to being saved.
#32 - Farewells
Now that I understand all the things that Daemien intended me to, I stare at the stone floor of the temple I collapsed against with the sudden knowledge, very simply and without any malice, that there is no way for Daemien to forgive everything I’ve done since the very first betrayal.
#33 - World
My entire meaning for living is present in the hesitant touch of Daemien’s hand against my back, and I know that I will not go on once he leaves; the separate parts of my soul cry out it the same voice: we cannot live without him, he is our world, but we will spare him the pain of knowing that we will die when he leaves so that he is not hindered by any need to save us from ourselves.
#34 - Formal
Until the moment when he leaves, I cannot bring myself to remain proper or formal--tears run down my cheeks freely when I turn onto my back to face him, and I allow myself the questions that weigh down my mind, like why Daemien would follow me, try to save me, after everything I’ve done.
#35 - Fever
“I didn’t follow you through three lives just to let you go,” he says, and “Do you still love me?”--the question burns through me, hot with hope and need and urgency, and... maybe he can forgive me, given time; I’m ready to spend eternity making it up to him, because any day is a day worth living if he’s there with me.
Genre: Fantasy - Eysuria
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,400
This was intended to be for another RCR challenge, which was based off of a fifty sentences challenge on some LJ community. Basically you are given fifty one-word prompts and you write a sentence response to each which embodies the meaning of the word. I got to 35 sentences and realized the story was done, so I didn’t enter the challenge with it, but I did like the result. Be warned: long, convoluted sentences (like I used to write regularly!).
#01 - Ring
It is an eternal instant; his touch sparks an electric collision of our souls, and suddenly I can see it all come full circle--me pushing him away (every him there ever was or will be) out of terror that he does not love me, restructuring the world to distract myself from the hollow ache, reuniting with him and burning with the betrayal in his eyes, and dying just to wake into the cycle anew.
#02 - Hero
This is my savior: he is my almost-mirror, an amalgam of something just more than three souls fighting to align themselves into one heart, and each one of them loving me (or one of the souls that is Aerlun-Braden-Eivyr) enough to follow me through incarnation after incarnation in a desperately blind attempt to save me from the cycle that I forced myself into by betraying him and running from the pain I didn’t want to admit I caused in the first place.
#03 - Memory
If I let go, if I allow the force ignited by our touch to guide my soul through its course--well, I’m not sure where I’ll end, but I know I’ll begin in rewalking all the steps that got us to this place: mine and his.
#04 - Box
I am Daemien; it is a memory that wasn’t mine, but now it is ours, and so the claustrophic feeling of being locked in Casella’s closet as punishment for not being her personal thief and spy is real enough that I can feel the brick and the wood grain on every side pressing against my own skin.
#05 - Run
By the time Daemien finally escaped Casella, he was tired of running; it took three attempts, and each brought him closer to giving up all hope--the first time, when he could do nothing but watch as a small clan of his own kind was murdered by spirit wraiths, just as his family had been; the second time, when the friend who agreed to take him on as an apprentice died in such a way that he couldn’t help but suspect Casella’s involvement; and the third time, when he did escape, but he ended up enslaved for a crime he didn’t commit.
#06 - Hurricane
He remembers (and so I remember) our meeting and first romance as a storm; like many storms, it started with a rumble of thunder, raged at full fury for a time, and then spiraled into little but an echo in the air with destruction left in its wake.
#07 - Wings
His memories of being Lydon are more painful, since there are no memories of happiness between me and Daemien; we share memories of Lydon and Braden’s brief summer of bliss in the same way that we share each other’s memories now, because we came into their souls after almost all the love--all the flutter of butterflies in the stomach, all the floating feelings of romance--was gone.
#08 - Cold
A memory I don’t want to experience, but I force myself to anyway: I am him when he was Lydon, and I hold the still, dead body of Triel in my arms, grieving intensely and cursing the woman who killed him (a woman hired by me, and so this terrible emptiness that Lydon and now I feel, it was my fault).
#09 - Red
There is the sickening swell of blood that runs down black skin and torn, dirty clothes--I see it through Lydon’s eyes, but it is mine (or Braden’s?), and for the first time I feel the intense pain it caused Lydon to see me take my own life even though he thought he was beyond feeling anything but hatred for me.
#10 - Drink
Apricot’s memory of meeting Eivyr is nostalgic; through him, I find myself across the illoki seeing pool from Eivyr before I ever awoke in him, watching with fascination the black-skinned stranger so brazen as to drink from such a sacred pool of water.
#11 - Midnight
Apricot and Eivyr’s romance before I woke was even briefer than Lydon and Braden’s, like a sunset before the black of night; quickly the deepest hour of darkness arrived, when I was at my worst conquering Apricot’s world, and the terror he felt (and I feel too) knowing that I was coming to torture the power from his body aches too sharply to be just memory.
#12 - Temptation
When Daemien came to Apricot in the decaying form of Lydon’s body--the sensation of being in Apricot’s mind at this moment is most jarring, and it aches, but my own feelings echo his perfectly--the choice Daemien gave him to make was a burning coal in his stomach; Eivyr and I were distinctly separate in his mind, and though the tiniest hope of saving Eivyr from what I made him become was almost unbearably enticing, he was also terrified of facing me and even a little uncertain whether saving Eivyr was the right thing to do if it meant saving me too.
#13 - View
The vision Apricot brought to the amalgam of Daemien-Lydon-Apricot was sharp and new; he opened them to the possibility of taking a new body without ripping the soul from it first as spirit wraiths do, allowing their combined soul to remain anchored in Apricot’s body as it had not been in Daemien’s or Lydon’s, and suddenly the thought of meeting me face-to-face was not a desperate but ultimately doomed final resort.
#14 - Music
He came face-to-face with me for the first time since he’d become more than one soul, and rather than being pulled into the magnetic whirlwind around me and lost into eternity as he feared, he stood against me, fought me, spoke the words he’d ached to say to me for more than a lifetime--and finally touched me in an explosion of harmony, spiraling outward before beginning to implode back into ourselves.
#15 - Silk
As the explosion pulls back inward, Daemien begins to remember with me: he feels what it was to be naïve among the Whips on a more basic level than even Lydon and Braden were a lifetime later, and what it was like to fall in love with the handler who saved me from my first brush with slavery--Silk, who cared for no one but had the open face of a kinder man, and who created the first fissure in my heart, one that grew with each successive betrayal (lovers’ betrayals of me, but my betrayals of them at least as often).
#16 - Cover
Silk used me, and when I grew tired of being used, he tried to cover his involvement in his own clandestine missions by pinning them on me; it didn’t work, but we were exiled together, and we fought on the ship to the Black Coast--he ended up in the river, and I ended up in a collar for murder, and it very nearly broke me (though if it had, maybe that would have been a better fate for all involved).
#17 - Promise
Daemien echoes the wordless promise he made in befriending me and bringing me back from the brink of self-destruction (the first time, at least) when we met in collars together: you deserve your name, you deserve to live, you deserve freedom, you are worth saving, and most of all you are worth loving.
#18 - Dream
My hopeful vision of what the world could be back then is a nightmare in retrospect--maybe not in the way I saw it originally, but in what it did to the world when I tried to bring it to pass.
#19 - Candle
Together Daemien and I freed first ourselves, then the slaves of our masters’ household, then the slaves of Brevel, and eventually the slaves of the entire empire; the flickering light of our dream of freedom spread like wildfire, and soon destroyed in just the same way.
#20 - Talent
Daemien saw through the idyllic picture of what could be to what was becoming eventually, but my usual knack for understanding what went on around me failed me then; I had too much faith in that ability, so much that I didn’t trust it when Daemien began to tell me that the direction we were headed was wrong, that we were just turning the hatred leveled against us back around and wielding it at a new target rather than eliminating it.
#21 - Silence
Remembering, I can recognize the point when Daemien stopped protesting, stopped speaking much to me at all, because he realized that I was too much in the grip of hatred, power, and Lyss’ influence to listen; it hurts us both to remember, especially since each of us finally understands fully how the other felt, and we each feel we gave up on the other for a time.
#22 - Journey
Maybe this is where our chase through the ages truly started: I swore I trusted Daemien, but Lyss had me questioning him at the end, and Daemien swore he would never give up on me, but the vision the spirit wraith gave him of what I could do to the world combined with my refusal to listen to his pleas finally convinced him that the only way to stop me might be for me to die.
#23 - Fire
My first death burned: the poison was acid eating away at my veins and I knew I was dying, and I knew the magic Lyss made me work would bring me back in the next generation, but I didn’t want that anymore--Lyss was right, Daemien allowed me to die, he held me and rocked me crying into oblivion--my soul was ripped into the current of Consciousness that it almost touched in life and the onrush of everything (other souls, life, magic, the endless expanse of time in all directions) seared through me but never numbed, never, until the magic wove me into a new body.
#24 - Strength
Waking in Braden’s body was agony because his past so mirrored my own; the sudden memories that had been his but were now my own tortured me with my own mistakes done over, and I struggled to break away, because I could not endure the betrayal again--but I found strength in the determination to shield myself from the coming betrayal by shoving Lydon away before he could show he didn’t love Braden-me after all.
#25 - Mask
I hid all the pain away behind a façade, insulating myself from everyone and seeking to continue the work I started before my first death mainly as a distraction from the feelings I’d buried deep inside--but they were closer to the surface than I ever imagined, and when I saw Lydon, I couldn’t contain them anymore, and the pain of betraying him broke me down.
#26 - Ice
So when I woke in Eivyr’s body, I thought I was prepared; I forced my heart to turn cold, and I pushed Apricot away (it wasn’t hard, Eivyr’s people pushed him away for me), and when conquering the surrounding kingdoms brought me to the ‘need’ to torture Apricot for the power he guarded, I vowed not to lay eyes on him until the very end so that maybe I could resist the pain I suspected lay waiting even more powerful than the lifetime before.
#27 - Fall
I wasn’t strong enough to resist when my guards told me that Apricot demanded that I face him, and so they brought him before me; though I tried to steel myself against it, my world plummeted around his bleeding form, and perhaps it was that weakness that opened the door to my salvation.
#28 - Forgotten
I did manage to fight him for a time, but when I drew fresh blood and saw it trace rivulets through the sand and dried blood on his skin, I forgot all the reasons I had for justifying his torture and death, and could only feel the ache that bloomed in my chest for causing him more pain.
#29 - Dance
The force of our touch spirals inward and spins lazy circles around our cores, forming a band of light between us and around us; it connects us like eshari dancers’ ribbons, but it encloses our entire forms rather than just our waists.
#30 - Body
The brilliant image of light fades and leaves us in our separate bodies--I can still feel it there, connecting us to one another, and I realize that we have always been connected in a more tenuous way, but this new connection is powerful and permanent.
#31 - Sacred
Alone in my own body, the flurry of memories and feelings dwindles to just two: a blinding feeling of guilt for everything I’ve done to Daemien, Lydon, and Apricot as well as to the rest of the world, and an incredible sense that this amalgam of my three lovers (do I call him Daemien? Lydon? Apricot?) is nothing short of a saint in his willingness to follow me through as many incarnations as it took to reach out to me at a time when I was finally open to being saved.
#32 - Farewells
Now that I understand all the things that Daemien intended me to, I stare at the stone floor of the temple I collapsed against with the sudden knowledge, very simply and without any malice, that there is no way for Daemien to forgive everything I’ve done since the very first betrayal.
#33 - World
My entire meaning for living is present in the hesitant touch of Daemien’s hand against my back, and I know that I will not go on once he leaves; the separate parts of my soul cry out it the same voice: we cannot live without him, he is our world, but we will spare him the pain of knowing that we will die when he leaves so that he is not hindered by any need to save us from ourselves.
#34 - Formal
Until the moment when he leaves, I cannot bring myself to remain proper or formal--tears run down my cheeks freely when I turn onto my back to face him, and I allow myself the questions that weigh down my mind, like why Daemien would follow me, try to save me, after everything I’ve done.
#35 - Fever
“I didn’t follow you through three lives just to let you go,” he says, and “Do you still love me?”--the question burns through me, hot with hope and need and urgency, and... maybe he can forgive me, given time; I’m ready to spend eternity making it up to him, because any day is a day worth living if he’s there with me.