Re: quiet home garden: alyssa & damian
[The crucible of Damian's birth was one of contradiction, and he had nourished and grown upon in the same. In a swallow of shadows and light. In a system of caves, a prince, told he was the best, engineered to be so, and punished severely when he failed. He was made to believe he could do anything, while he was controlled and manipulated by a master puppeteer. He was gestated in a false womb, birthed ten years ago, but he was human. The perfection demanded of him was out of his reach, but still he grasped. He felt little to no physical pain and he fought to feel none, emotionally, psychically. He had no fears, save for the hundreds of thousands that dripped from mental stalactites and grew up in molten flowstone.—He did not fear Alyssa, and he did seek to understand her.
Her touch was gentle. He allowed it, though his expression was skeptical. Briefly, he was confounded by her presence. She was nothing like Mother—Mother, who did not know gentleness, who did not call him anything but 'son' or 'Damian,'—yet she reminded him of her. She called him 'baby,' and it was not as Misha did so. She touched fingers to twin temples. She breathed upon him a lungful of medicated breath.
The seagrass green of Damian's gaze was forced to nothing but rime around ballooning pupils; the ocean was sucked into the depths of Hell. His heartbeat ticked upwards. And the night, as it had existed, disappeared before the shifting, careening, bleeding, liminal vision of P O S S I B I L I T Y as the man's vision thinned. It was not as if the veil of reality had been lifted. It was as if it had never existed. The river of Damian's mind was swollen; it rolled fat and greasy over its banks. The world was muddy and flooding and pure and he felt as if he could see every inch. He could see atoms frying over one another, shimmying in nothingness, making up his skin, his bone, his muscle, fascia, tendon, vein, organ. The words spoken to him—words he no longer realized issued from the woman beside him—appeared before him in a web of flowers growing wetly, their stalks slithering, serpentine and sharp-toothed. Tell me a joke.
His words were primal tongue.] I am at war. [He smiled. Still blind to reality, he could see crimson bloom. He took up Alyssa's thumb and sucked from it a drop of blood; in his mind's eye, it was something small and warm and beautiful without a name, not a thumb, not belonging to anyone. He swallowed. Now he understood the seed she had spat into the dirt. It would grow, nourished as he had been in blood. From its branches would hang corpses, its arms a gallows to all men. That was fairly funny. He laughed.]