July 16, 2012 - 9:32pm — SarieBearie
If Vipin was certain of anything, they were few in number:
The sky was a huge blue eye, and the sun was blonde. He was also fairly certain of another thing—he was alive. But he didn’t know for sure. He had been here for so long, in the world without trees, with only several reoccurring characters for company. Two of these characters were his sisters, one a tall, barb-tongued rebel with steel blue eyes, who he had known for a very long time, who was the other side of his soul, the rougher, more sarcastic side. That wasn’t all she was, though. He could see emotions well behind her eyes and feel sobs in her steps and could sense feeling in every breath she took. His other sister, the fairly boned, gossamer peacock, was small and rarely spoke. She had marvelously violet eyes that changed shades if you stared too long, and a heart that swelled bigger than her tiny body.
There were a few other characters. One was a golden stag whose antlers, rooted to his head, stemmed far into the sky. He was always accompanied by a slender, charming red doe who could evaporate into thin air. Together they created a dynamic of sorts, with the stag’s earthly presence and the doe’s watery effervescence, and it was strangely comforting, but Vipin rarely saw them. They came and went as they pleased, to nowhere in particular, leaving flowers wherever they stepped. He wished they would stay when he approached them. The stag always disappeared in a lightning-strike of branches and the doe turned into the sky. It left him with his sisters and three other figures.
These three figures were royalty; a king, a queen, and the Black Hand's prince.
The king, Nevermore, was dead. As was the queen, Azalea, and her prince, Calisto. Vipin knew this well. His sister, the tall one with steely gaze, had stabbed Azalea straight through the eyes. He himself had murdered Nevermore on a starless, black night. Calisto had died much earlier.
This was why he was only fairly certain he was alive—he had no recollection of ever dying, but yet he had had several pleasant conversations with three murdered royals. This was limbo—neither Heaven or Hell, if either of them even existed, to which he had no idea—where the martyrs of the Forest resided. Nevermore had been a child of bloodlust and adultery and had lived a life of infamy before being put down by his own son, his polar opposite. Azalea, born of ultimate beauty, had died ugly. And Calisto, perhaps the most uncertain of all, had appeared to Azalea’s sheer luck and had been murdered by Nevermore’s unlucky temper.
It was worth mentioning that none of them had wanted to live those lives. Nevermore had been a god’s creation gone awry, Azalea an attempt to prove that even beauty was not perfect, and Calisto the subject of ultimate martyrdom. Nevermore had said, once upon a dream, one different from this, that he had wished, every moment, to change his fate. Azalea had agreed, and Calisto, quietly handsome and fairly boned, had nodded. But that was how it had been. They hadn’t had any choice like that. Nevermore, Azalea and Calisto had been doomed to die from the very beginning—Nevermore by his son’s antlers, Azalea by her daughter’s wound, and Calisto from the hard metal bindings of Nevermore’s mind.
What came with this residence in the area of martyrs, Vipin assumed, was complete uncertainty. He didn’t know if he missed the Forest or not. He knew he missed a certain helmeted doe, and that his sisters missed a golden dragonfly and a dream watcher, respectively. But he didn’t know if he missed the Forest itself, in its entirety, the essence of it. There was a lot of violence and too much death and small glimmers of life that came and went as they pleased. The seasons came sporadically—winter fell like a suffocating white blanket only to be whisked away by the flowering of spring. New deer arrived every day and old friends changed. His body was covered in scars. It had tired him. Physically and emotionally and the depths in between, the Forest had taken a massive toll on him.
Here, it was spring.
The sky was always blue.
Nevermore and Azalea, the two figures who had haunted him for so long, were kind and amicable here. Calisto, as an entity, was alive. Vipin, Aspen and Xylia finally, at last, too far into their lives, had parents.
The thought had already made Vipin cry.
Maybe that was why they felt so comfortable; they were all martyrs themselves, and they fit into the mold of this world, something that none of them had ever been able to do in the other.
The choice to leave was their own. But every time Vipin moved a step in either direction he was turned around by another idea. An idea that here, he could live forever. An idea that back in the Forest, his memory (hopefully good), would live forever. His sisters didn’t help. He mostly found Aspen staring aimlessly at nothing in particular, and made no effort to get at the emotions in the hollows of her eyelids. Xylia, though kind, was mutable, and changeable. “Whatever you want,” she would say. He supposed a secret part of her refused to leave because she had become attached to the father she had never known.
Nevermore and Calisto tended to divert away from that particular topic. Azalea, with her continuously stupefying beauty and eyes like precious gems, was the only one who ever answered. “Your sisters look up to you, Vipin,” her lilting, transparent voice said, “you have to make the decision. And since you’re in the land of martyrs, there is neither a right nor a wrong decision. You’ve seen that your father and I were not the nightmares that haunted you. We’ve seen that you and your sisters have become incredible and lovely. Don’t you think it’s enough?”
“But here, it’s so…”
No words in this time existed to describe the place where they resided. Vipin left it as a blank, the space between what he thought and what he said.
Azalea merely nodded. They always left it at that. It never made his decision any easier.
Vipin harbored secret reasons for his never-ending indecisiveness, and he knew it.
He was haunted by the living. He had never been haunted by his father or his mother or anyone else. He was haunted by life, the toil and the scars that it had brought him, the awful pain it had brought Aspen and the heartbreak it had brought Xylia. He loved living here, where one was never living nor dead, where there was no black-and-white, only gray. Life, in all it’s parts, had exhausted him. He didn’t want to have to return to that again. To return to the Forest, only to be hit clear across the face by all the troubles he had missed. He didn’t miss that.
He did miss them, though.
He didn’t know what they were called, the spaces in between seconds, but he thought about them then.
we miss you. And Kaoori
And Kaoori still misses Vipin terribly. She thinks of him often.
*licks this blog* ...yea, I
Your writing is delectable
I miss you guys so much but I
y'all are perfect though and THANK YOU DANNII ;~; waaaa I know I must be annoying popping in and out of here I'm so glad you guys are always so nice