Once, his head tilted - almost. But that had been the only expressive movement she had noticed him make before her gaze had wondered of again to watch the lake bathe in the night sky. "And who did you see?" Maren's alabaster head turned back at the stallion for a moment, paused there in a thoughtful anticipation, and then returned to the waters to hang there again, sinking almost so low that the tips of her mane almost rippled the surface. Somehow, even despite his quietness, he had been able to figure out the point she wanted to make.

What do you want me to say, her pondering mind thought. But the game was done and it was time to show herself what cards she had been hiding. On them were the answers she sought, but they were answers she already knew. Who did you want me to see? She questioned again as two different versions of answers circled her mind – And why did she care?

Because, no matter how many times she denied it – how many times she failed, she still tried. For deep inside she wanted to care, wanted to be an anchor - trusted and depended upon. But what she had seen then at their beginning had not been the truth; a phantasm of the mind. So she had to question herself once more: For what did she see – really – behind the veil of her own troubled mind, behind the drapes of her own idiotic desperation and her dramatic longing for salvation? Back then, when she had lain there in her own shattered sanctuary; when he had stood there, who was it that she had seen?

But it's not like I didn't expect you to ask this question.

And she wouldn't have asked it if she didn't know the answer – unless this was the final test from her subconscious. To be or not to be? For perhaps she had asked herself more than she had asked the King of Fireflies. So, still pondering, she looked at the silvery waters and watched the darkness, the deep stillness, below the shivering and slithering snakes of the falling light over the water surface: Like how the winds had fallen into her sails and had then whispered that she was in his debt. And thus, after a silence in which the forest was able to finish another of its night-time symphony’s, the eyes of the mare in the mist turned to the stallion once again. He stood there, still, glimmering in the quiet light. The Ice prince, the King in the mist, the ash-flecked stallion, the King of Fireflies, the fake King, the King made by mistake – and whatever other names he had returned to as in her mind. What was he really when she took it all away? Her lips parted, ready to form words, but then she hesitated for a moment. Then suddenly there were new whispers as she looked at him with the same pale purple gaze.

“I remember that there was nothing left to see.” Fragile words sounding too breakable compared to how they should've sounded – and had – in her head. But then she remembered that she had been a tragic marble doll waiting to be smashes against her own holy white marble walls.

“It felt like my sanctuary had shattered, my mountains of reasoning had turned to dust. I knew I was being childish for not trying hard enough to understand. Stupid, unreasonable, but I was gambling with faith. And one does not gamble with faith, and I had forgotten that. I was hypnotized by it, couldn’t look away. Not from the path I had broken and build up all by myself with all the truths and wisdom I had found. But it was breaking me now and I still couldn’t look away.”

In her irises arose the vague smoke from memories better left forgotten. But her eyes kept silent, even with the far-away emotion as they crowned words whispered into the thick misty air. Like a cloud floating by. But her voice changed, if only just slightly, for it was softer, and although just slightly it had a strange layer underneath. One she could not explain herself.

“You walked into the mist, but somehow you stopped at some distance. I never understood why you didn’t just came fluttering to me, like some moth; pushing some caring words in my face and obliging me to tell you what was wrong.” Because somehow the world worked in a way that that would’ve been the humane thing to do – Because that was what she would’ve done in a world where she would’ve been perfect. “But you didn’t. And, I think it was then, I began to realize you either didn’t care or didn’t see.” But she was not – he was not.

Because, just like him – in all of her perfect imperfection – and unlike Rei, she would have been blind to both seeing and caring as well.

“But somehow that night you were still the angel I needed.” It didn’t sound like a compliment (for that would’ve been strange) as much as an observation from the past; a tribute to a memory that she now knew had been a lie. Looking back: It was a phantasm that had saved her that night. She still looked at him, but now the smoke in her eyes had cleared out as the memory was gone from her vision; now forever locked away as a lie in the back of her head.

“You were not a king, but neither a servant, a slave, a hero or a saint. Not an angel – not a demon.” She concluded in the end. "You are what I saw you as the first time: A figure in the mist.” How many times she could call him her saving grace; the angel that pulled her away from the darkness. Without the veil of her clouded judgement all that she had seen was not there anymore to cover up; left naked by the world. For what she had seen was untrue in the eyes of anyone other than her. Existed only in her own judgement. He was just like everyone, and she could not make it sound otherwise without a veil of her own stupid desperation.

So she shrugged childishly, almost teasingly.
“You just are.”

And with that she turned her tiger-striped body around to the pond once again, and this time dipped her head to its surface – still glimmering with snakes – and drank as her throat had gone dry from the talking. But in the back of her mind still echoed one little sentence as she watched a frog flee into the dark deepness of the below.

... I just.. am.

Have you, too, fled into that darkness?



@[Mauja]

Maren

BY THE PRECEPTS OF HER PURITY