A white, black-spotted stallion strode through the snow. A white, black-spotted owl rode on his shoulder. Two sets of pale blue eyes watched the world, watched the small flakes of snow drifting from a hazy sky.

But they were neither here, nor there. They were not in Helovia as you know it.

Mauja's frustrated strides slowly bled out into nothing, like the flow of a river as the years dam it up: it was how he felt, too, as if he could measure himself in eternities and not mere years. He felt like the tree that had fallen, unbowed, like the mountain that was cracked without crumbling: defeated, but not broken. His hot skin steamed in the dark night, breath clouding his muzzle and ice adorning his whiskers. He knew this place. He knew every inch of snow, every curve of the horizon, every bump in the landscape. He was alone, and yet not alone at all.

"I love you, my dear," her ghost had said, black as the darkest of skies. "But why are you so cold?"
"Because I am made of ice," he had snapped at her, frustrated. She had flinched, hurt. She was nothing of her sinister smiles and poisoned purrs, nothing of ambition and sharp edges - just soft and loving.
She was not Psyche.

His head tilted back, eyes fluttering shut as he raised his muzzle to the sky. Frigid air burned his throat as he whispered his mantra, over and over again: "I'm still alive I'm still alive I'm still alive I'm still alive I'm still alive..." but doubt laced his every syllable. Desperation and will drove him to take the next breath, for his heart to take the next beat. The burning sensation of cold air in his heaving lungs felt good. ".. I'm still alive I'm still alive I'm still alive I'm still alive I'm still alive..." But how can you be alive, when everyone you meet don't exist?

Or when those who should exist, didn't?

Sometimes they shifted. Sometimes they changed. One day, Deimos had turned up in his life, just as randomly as he'd turned up in the World's Edge. But there had been no sinister vibration in the air, no glow of blue upon his poll and horn: there had been no words spoken in that odd blend of roughness and poison, so feline. He'd even been nice.

A few days later he'd shown up, again, as a scarred, scared stallion who had been shunned by society.

And at some point, the Edge had stretched out for miles on end into the sea, and once when he ambled south, the Veins of the Gods had been nothing but a few scattered rocks and the peak of a volcano, not yet having spewed out that which formed what it was - today? No, he scolded himself, still whispering ".. I'm still alive I'm still alive I'm still alive I'm still alive I'm still alive...", today doesn't exist. I don't exist anymore.

Are we all dead?

He hissed; since Irma had gone silent, he'd begun to think he'd actually died. That at first, it had just been some state of comatose, but that he'd since then given up, his heart collapsed, and the tenuous link he'd had with his bird had shattered. Each probe he sent her faded like the day's heat after sunset, but for some reason she remained with him - perhaps because death had never known them to be apart, even in life? Mauja had tried to give up thinking - tried to swear off doing it, but how could he stop his mind from spinning frantically when each time he woke, he was still trapped here? Only in sleep was everything silent, and in sleep he fled to the life he had left behind - if it had been a life at all - and dreamed of those he had loved and since lost.

Not caring that he stood in the middle of the snowy tundra, he sighed, tilted his hips and leaned a hind hoof on its tip. Perhaps he would dream of nothing, and awake where he belonged.

As he slipped into the embrace of sleep, he felt - as always - that fearful spasm of not waking, that this time, there would be no going back, and then his mind slid off into oblivion.

this thread is for Ophelia.

( For those of you who aren't up-to-date about what's going on with Mauja, he's trapped somewhere in time, in a shifting alternate reality of Helovia. He's able to meet "alternate selves" of characters on the site, how they would've been if things in their life had played out differently etc, so it has nothing at all to do with how they actually are, or their actual histories, as the reason for their "different behaviors" is based on the fact that their actual histories never happened. )