Melianarrheyal

by G. Deyke

  ~*~

  She steps out of the shadows and stands before me, hiding me from sight. She points away, down the street. “The kretchin ran that way!” she cries. “Quick, it's getting away!”

  Her lip twitches up in a smirk as she turns to face me. She looks over me without seeing me. She starts when I speak to her, blabbering my thanks, but soon the smirk is back. “What do they call you, kretchin?” she asks. “I'll take care of you. Don't you worry.”

  My shoulder is alive with pain, my life seeping down my back and down my arm.

  “You'll come with me, won't you?”

  Her eyes are full of betrayal, and she is screaming, screaming...

  My sight bursts into colored stars, and I can see nothing, nothing, only her, only her smile and her eyes the color of storm. “Have you learned?” she asks. “Will you listen now?”

  Her scream echoes through my mind, loud and fierce and shrill. My eye is weeping, bleeding, leaking. There is nothing but her scream. I am nothing. There is only she: her flowing golden hair, her flashing gray eyes, her smiles and her anger and the scar that makes her real. There is only she.

  I wake up weeping, wishing beyond wishes that it could help to claw my eye and its demon partner from my skull. But I have been blind, and it did not stop me from dreaming. All I can do is weep, and cough up the churning in my stomach, and whistle to Snake to protect me, to save me, to cleanse my mind from all this memory and allow me at last to forget.