en natt så kall och månen den var klar

Some part of him told him he ought to have walked away, and let the conversation become memory, store it in the vast halls of his mind. But he couldn't. He'd never been good at letting sleeping dogs lie, but always nudged around with his nose, too thirsty for every answer and every mystery. And so far, their meeting had been one of the most baffling and strange, his mind fluttering between all the shallow emotions he knew, and sometimes he wasn't quite there at all. In an hour, or two, a day and a night, he would've sorted through it, and felt all the things he ought to have felt at the time, and kicked himself for all the things he said or hadn't said, and all the questions left unasked, unanswered.

He'd even forgotten to feel confused about what he'd done to her, that paradoxical treatment, too caught up in the strange swirl of their conversation. By all rights they should've been bloody by now, having flown at one another's throats, but somehow, they hadn't.

Not that this was much better. At least there was logic to battle and life in the adrenaline—this was just baffling and utterly confusing.

The cat got thrown aside as Delinne hauled herself off the ground, and Mauja's owls followed suit, dispersing into the surrounding trees. Their eyes gleamed whenever a stray ray of sunlight struck their irises, cold blue and burnished amber. Nothing made sense anymore, and she was smiling again, but Mauja barely noticed it anymore. Somehow, they'd gone deep enough into the strangeness than it seemed almost like it was supposed to be that way. And deep in his chest, his heart slogged on, and his detached mind floated somewhere above the pleasant chill of his body.

She answered him, after a fashion, but just like he had never been able to answer her straightly, and always went off on some tangent, she did, too. She rewound the tape, as if she'd never left him standing in the stream at all, picking up where he'd left off, speaking of monsters—but hers were tangible, and she was driven mad with half-remembered snatches of a past she didn't want to remember.

He thought of Ophelia, and her wiped memories, and how it had done her no good at all. Forgetting was not an option, but remembering was too hard, wasn't it? So you were never strong enough to move on.

But their main difference was that Mauja remembered: Mauja remembered everything, especially the starry constellations glittering so far up above, out of reach, on that cold, dreadful night. It had smelled of blood, overpowering even the smell of bear, and he'd floated away in the haze of cold and agony. For as long as he'd lain there, it had been pleasant, like some distant dream of cold beauty, and perhaps it would've been better if he'd died, too.

Mauja remembered, and remembering was what had forced him onto his knees.

The darkness swept back in again, clouded up her gaze and voice and spat words; it struck a chord deep in his soul, rang through the hollow ice, and spiked his blood with a sudden, bone-deep chill. The sunlit day seemed darker and sharper, and one of his breaths pooled coldly into the air before dissipating. "Like punching ice through a heart," he whispered, his faint voice tinged with darkness. And of course, it was there, the blackness and the frigidity, snapping at his mind, whispering that he'd done this before, it wasn't hard, it wasn't bad, it's okay—

A spire of ice punched up from the ground, struck towards the mocking sky and strained against its bonds; it towered higher even than Mauja's back, its deadly tip glinting in the sunlight.

He remembered the crimson blood slowly sliding down it, out of a golden chest, too.

It sobered him up. One mistake too many. He blinked the darkness away, and the spike shattered, fell down onto the ground with its magic broken, little pieces reflecting the harsh sunlight as they slowly melted in its light, but lay longer in the dappled shadows. "Too many times, Delinne... I've killed too many times." He seemed weak beside her, mewling and pathetic as she was the hungry beast—but he was done with irrational anger, wasn't he?

"Death is pointless, and to rob others of life is cruel."
Yet it's a drug I can't resist.

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