End of hope.. end of love.. end of time, the rest is silence.

He had invited the darkness again, and it swept in like a tide, carrying them away. Just as he had ever invited damnation and agony, he now again succumbed to the weakness, and the barriers of his mind weakened further as the nightmare crowded closer. It was always lying in wait, just beyond the edges of his consciousness, and as his strength failed when faced with this imperfectly perfect picture of his past, it sneaked even closer. Like writhing snakes of shadows they wormed their way deeper, into his flesh, aiming for his soul — but finding only ice. He fled deeper into the winter of his heart, deeper into his conviction that it had to be right, and some lingering remnant of strength held the ghouls at bay. They continued to whisper like voices from hell, but they did not flood the odd space of darkness in which he and Psyche stood, rooted. Perfectly still. He knew that his heart was beating, but was he breathing anymore?

He thought he ought to say something, that he hated her or loved her or something in between, but his tongue was tied in his mouth and his mind was blank. Words, what are words? He just stared, dumbly, at her sleek black body, the faint movement of her mane, the panic in her predator's eyes — he nearly let his gaze sweep away, though it clicked after a few seconds and it zoned in on her eyes again.

Psyche — panic?

Don't be afraid, he wanted to say, but instead she fell forward.. ever forward.. her muzzle parted his body like a searing hot knife, and a guttural, unearthly shriek tore from his throat, but he could not back away. The rest of her midnight body followed, ripping through his flesh and turning his brain inside out. And then she was gone, as if nothing of her had ever been here, except he was quivering and sweating all over. "Psyche?" he whispered, and then screamed, "PSYCHE!".

But only silence answered him. He had lost her, again, and he was alone, no closer to home, only further away. All the distance and cold of the Milky Way lay between them, and in the darkness he lowered his eyes to his hooves. Irma sat there, and peered up at him with her odd blue eyes, but she said nothing, made no move. No tendrils of emotion reached out to him. Could Psyche ever be so vulnerable in life, as she had been in this dream..? So small, so fragile... He ground his jaws together, and the dream faded. Throughout the day he kept sleeping in fits and starts, though for a long while, he thought he could hear the echo of hoof falls — and whenever he jerked awake, they seemed to haunt him still.

In the end, wherever he turned in his dreams, they chased him, that sound, so hauntingly familiar, so painful to remember, and he could never quite figure out if he ran from them, or to them.

Mauja Frosthjärta