Andarin: The Mountains: nicodemus; --

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper.

- T. S. Eliot

Becoming is such a strange thing.

She becomes like a larva turns to pupa, incubating in a fine bed of silk; she becomes like a pupa turns to moth. It is a slow metamorphosis, hers, bit by bit, as she grows and grows; one day her limbs feel thicker, though they would always be slender, one night it is the mane that lingers still in a haphazard mohawk even as she strides into her third year, that cants into arcs of matted hair down the sides of her narrow crest.

“Oh, don’t be so dour,” she says in a voice that is smoke and ash, filly and mare, “so dramatic!”

But even as she laughs, and she does, in a way reminiscent of light and rain and wind – free and wild and reckless – she turns one silver eye to him, and wonders.

Had she known – and she doesn’t – she might have wondered why one would desire to be part of a bigger feudal lord’s army (protect me and I won’t rape your women and take over your lands, beloved vassal) bound by a stifling and often unfeasible (not to mention contradictory) moral code – but then, she doesn’t know.

Plus, samurais are a lot cooler.

As are ninjas.

Especially ninjas.

Ahem. Moving on.

“Maybe they don’t understand because it doesn’t make sense,” she tilts her head as she stares at him – absolutely, as she always does, as if the world faded to black once her attention was focused. “Either to them or at all.”

Well. Yeah.

Anyway.

It’s then – by some consequence of events, some blip in chaos – that she turns her mind as abruptly as she turns her body to round up on him again.

Her eyes flash.

There is a mischievous smile in her lips.

If I were him, I’d run.

“I’m bored. Let’s play a game.”

I’d still be afraid.

***
jörmungandr
of night and light and half-light