The dream became a dream the moment Ashamin felt his kick after the retreat. It was as if time had rewound, morphed itself to play out different scenarios. He watched his leg pull back up from the water in reverse and make a slow, heady impact against Tiamat's chest. She was stumbling, splattered in blood, pulling herself away. If he knew anything, he knew it was his fault.

The mark on her chest was an immediate crescent he could not unsee--an indentation of the harm he caused, incarnate. He watched his leg drift back into the water, his teeth snap and then grit, slow, as his head retreated. He was living everything twice, as if it were not tiring enough the first time. Was this what dying was like? How long, then, would those last few seconds last? Ashamin doubted, then, that it was life that flashed before your eyes. No, just perhaps a moment, whatever unlucky thing greeted you seconds before death: over, over, and over again.

Ashamin heard the things he said again, but he wasn't sure if they were only echoes in his mind. Tiamat's eyes, so white, so pure, were filled with a fear he had given her. Did she really not know he was dying? Did she really think he could come out of this, two day old-gashes that had forced him to laying, to soaking in bone chilling waters with no food or company to carry him further in hope?

He would not be the one to tell her, then, of death. Perhaps she had never seen it, never felt its icy breath cold across her face. Maybe she didn't know much of it at all. He watched as she struggled to breathe, as she cast him looks of hurt, disbelief, and shame. The pair of them were no good at hiding their emotions, it seemed. They would always be partners of some sort with hearts on their sleeves.

And then she apologized, and his heart stopped, lodged in his throat.

He looked away, this time feeling the shame himself. She kept talking, warning, and he listened absently. He was drifting, anyhow: fading into something unlike life, something no herbs could steal him from.

This time, he braced himself. When the cold leaves touched to his wound he kicked but he kicked down, stirring up mud instead of trouble and pain. He threw his face into the water, black eyes open and staring down at that dark floor of the water. It seemed endless--consuming. He thought, for a moment, how much easier it would be to sink into it. All Tiamat was doing was drawing him further from its warmth, its promise of ending that pain.

But in time her medicine did it's trick, and he chewed and swallowed the last of another leaf left floating on the surface. He felt a numbness unlike the one the water had inflicted upon him--one, he thought, born of the healing work Tiamat was capable of.

When he pulled his head up from the water it dripped black, as if the markings on his face were bleeding into the water. But it was just mud and old blood. Everything was just that: mud, and old blood. He'd had old blood in his veins and he had old blood now, even as it left him.

"That's.... that's enough." the painted boy murmured, his eyes fluttering with exhaustion. "Just lay with me," he went on, dripping features reaching out to her chest. How could he tell her that nothing she could do would save him now? How could he explain that the best thing she could do was wait with him until his life was cut short by some God, some God called Mercy?

"" ""
[[Tiamat]]

ASHAMIN

Mercy
has no shrine.
She lives atop a temple of stones,
surrounded by worshippers,
each and all clutching candles,
little flames, close to their breasts.
But Mercy has no shrine,
my friend,
for Mercy is no God.