Her voice was familiar but impossible as it stumbled across the water and the waves she ushered towards him. Then again, feeling as if she were real, wasn't her voice always like that? So soft and kind, with the sense you'd known it all your life: that you'd found it in the sea and sky every time you'd lifted your head to watch the sunset over the water.

Ashamin wasn't sure, anymore. When she appeared he wanted to laugh, and in a way he sort of did--if laughter was short coughing bursts and plunging his face into quickly bloodying water just to try and stop the pressure of its pain. It was an attempt. A failed one, at best.

Given that just moments ago he had convinced himself that Tiamat was merely a figment of the deluded mind, seeing her was surprising, to say the least. His lips tumbled open, unsure; his long tail slapped the water, splashing himself with blood, and his large ears were pinned back to his head. It wasn't fear, exactly, but uncertainty was just as dangerous as that.

The paint felt his hooves sinking into the sandy muck beneath him. His whole body would slowly become covered in it, he thought. If he died here or if he somehow stood and walked away alive with aid, he would forever be stained in this black soil of frostfall waters.

"Tiamat..." It was all he could say. Her name. He knew it, and he knew her and the delicate arabian curve of her blue skin, and he didn't know how. Her being here and him seeing her was impossible. It meant some of that dream had been real, maybe. Well, that or he could tell the future. Perhaps he really was meant to be Haruspex, someday. He wanted to laugh again but a shooting pain made its way through his leg and up his body, insistent that he not forget his condition. Remember, the wound seemed to say, I've got a hold on your heart and a slippery grip on your life.

Ashamin found his teeth grinding and his face plunging back towards the cold. His uninjured leg kicked, but that motion alone was too much. His black eyes looked for Tiamat's white ones: he was pleading, hoping there was something in her that would help him. He felt her cheek touch his when he lifted his ebony features and he felt, for a moment, the comfort of bliss. He let his eyes close, he let warmth seep into his being. Was this how his father had felt, so long ago now, upon dying? And his mother, too, had she felt this same wash of comfort at the end in spite of her birthing pains? Tiamat was saying so many things, asking so many things, and he didn't know how to answer other than this with a groan, shift, and heave of his body and heart: "Don't ask me that, don't make me say it out loud."

It was a faint whisper of truth. Even now, he was ashamed. And yet, too, now he felt it all to be inconsequential. How strange, the effects of pain on the mind. "Will you help me, Tiamat?" he asked, his heart feeling heavy and slow in his breast, his breath catching. He was so cold, the water such an icy tomb, and yet he couldn't feel a drop of its frigidity. He didn't know what help meant. Maybe it was just staying there, with him, as his blood flowed red into the waters of the grove. Maybe it was letting him know it was ok to die.

How long had he been here? His eyes opened in bare slits and he caught sight of his fur and hair, matted, tangled, and mixed up with muck and blood. Were it not for the water, he was certain he would be dry and flaking red. It had been so long... it must have been so long. But how was he still bleeding, then? How was he still alive?

Ashamin's voice came out in a whisper, cracked and barely audible but undeniably spoken. He parroted, in an attempt to comfort her as if she were the wounded. His eyes fluttered, the patterns in Tiamat's horn became a shifting maze he could get lost in. "I’m here, my friend. You will be all right," was the murmured reply and repeat of the blue mare's gentle speech. It echoed on, his voice growing softer with each cycle of the words. "You will be all right," he said again, soft and aching as his heart wondered who this creature was and how her breath, so beautiful and lovely in its delicate exhalations, had come to cross with his. "Darling," he sighed, quiet, content, drawing closer to death, and not knowing even what the word meant, "you will be all right,".

"" ""
[[@[Tiamat] -feels all the feels-]]

ASHAMIN

Darling,
You will be all right.
We will be all right.

Ashamin felt her leave just as he registered her lingering beside him. He wanted to reach out but was too feeble, too wounded, too hurt. He let his head fall, floating on the surface of the water where he held it in suspension.

"I had a dream you were real..." Ashamin murmured quietly towards the mare, unsure if she would here. He didn't know much of anything now, not much of anything but how the pain was dulling and spread. The haruspex felt himself growing colder even as his forehead seemed to burn. Was this a fever dream again, then? He was awake, but Tiamat, she still wasn't here. She was just something he was wanting to see as his end drew closer.

It was foolish to ask a figment for help, just as it had been foolish to fight one. He remembered the snakes and the owl's test. Lochan... Lochan must be real, then, in some way. Maybe not hatched yet, but real. Ashamin no longer paid attention to Tiamat--she was leaving, speaking, something inconsequential. His head was lifted and his black eyes were searching, desperate, for the last sign of his companion's egg. That, at least, had to have been real.

He tried to straighten up but even that was too much. He couldn't remember what the egg looked like, anymore. Had it been brown? And what size... it could have been any of the stones beneath the water's surface. Ashamin felt himself giving up and in; he turned his features back to the water again, letting himself fall with exhaustion.

He heard Tiamat's return before she was at his side, and his eyes opened in mere slits. "Going to be alright..." he said quietly, wondering if it was true. The dream-mare was doing something, trying to put something on him, he could tell. He blinked at the scattered leaves floating on the surface of the water. What had she wanted him to do? Eat them? He felt petulant, like a young child. He remembered his father trying to teach him things as a colt, and he remembered even more clearly stubbornly refusing, and the stern scolding that often followed--the occasional lash of a tail. Ashamin grumbled, nosing the leaves and shoving them away. They wouldn't do him any good, he didn't think. Not now, not when he was like this. "I don't want to eat this, TiamAHHHH!"

The pain was sudden and unexpected--as injured as his leg was, he still had it in him to kick out with it, tearing the wound further and causing fresh blood to spurt up towards the blue mare. "You're killing me!" Ashamin screamed, his eyes so wide that the faintest trace of white could be seen at their lining. He snapped, his white teeth closing before her face, his words coming out as a horse neigh between them. "You'll never be a healer if you can't help a simple man die!"

The effort of speech, the simple subtlety of movement, was too much. He threw his face back in the water, letting it rest half above the surface and half sunken. His hindquarter twitched, sending streams of blood through the rippling water and fish chasing after and away from him. His long tail lifted, just barely, and fell to the surface with a snap, stinging the bites upon it.

He felt everything dim. He clenched his teeth, pulled back his large black ears. It hadn't been fair. Slowly he looked back to the mare where she stood trying to help, the movement of the black orbs imperceptible.

"I'm sorry," Ashamin said to a mare he thought could never exist, a mare he loved for that false reality. "Try again," he said quietly, his rage subsiding, his heart slowing. "It's going to be alright, Tiamat."

It's going to be alright, dreamgirl.

"" ""
[[@[Tiamat]]]

ASHAMIN

Come again, closer,
and heed my forgiveness.

This is our mantra of pain

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.

"Thank you."

These were the young buck's final words, spoken moments after Tiamat placed herself beside and beneath him, uttered in response to her touch, to her kindness, and her innocent, foolish belief that she could still save him from the inevitable.

To her love: so boundless, so selfless, so pure.

Do you feel any better?

It was all he heard. It was all he could think about. It was a question he couldn't answer, not when he lay there feeling nothing but Tiamat against him and a dull, creeping ache that he thought might be death. When he closed his eyes he saw darkness; when he opened them, he realized he couldn't, and he hadn't at all.

Ashamin's body was cement and his heart was a broken drum. He wanted to look at Tiamat, he longed to reciprocate her touch and answer her every word, but he was nothing, anymore. He couldn't move, he couldn't think, and he couldn't breathe.

He wasn't breathing.

He was dead.

Somehow, he knew he was dead.

Do you feel any better?

He heard her question again, over and over, an echo that he could not make stop until he could maybe, someday, find an answer. But how long would that take, trapped in this blackness? Death, he knew now, was nothing but a blindness.

Who was the you? What was it, to feel better? Somewhere in this dark space Ashamin moved. He lifted each leg through that old mud and blood, feeling their weights unlike he ever had before. He could see nothing but he could feel everything happening to him. He was dead, and he could feel everything.

The blood that dripped down his leg never landed. There was nothing to land in. There was just a quiet black and that echo of that voice he so longed to answer.

Do you feel any better?

"Tiamat...." he whispered in his mind, wishing he could will the name past death, wishing he could make it strike air and be spoken.

Do you feel?

"I..." It was nothing. Everything was nothing. The being, the existence, was gone. No air passed through his lips--slightly parted, black and white--as they and his head fell from its place on Tiamat's delicate forelegs and filled slowly with water and blood.

Do you?

"I..." He didn't know who "I" was. He didn't know who anyone was, who this Tiamat even was, this creature who lay beside him so steadfastly as if she owed him her presence, as if she owed him anything.

Do you?

"I feel...."

Ashamin opened his eyes to the darkness of a cave in the Aurora Basin, with Lochan's legs draped over his back and his body wrapped in the silken sarong. The cerndyr's eyes were wide with fear, trapped as witness to a dream his bonded had already forgotten.

Aloud, to no one, to nothing, in darkness, Ashamin spoke and he didn't know why.

"I feel.... better."

"" ""
[[Tiamat--If you want I can post NPC after you and we can keep it in one thread? Might make sense. Just tag me on Ashamin.]]

ASHAMIN

I feel
better

do you?