Desreal: To Elemmírë and Saphira: until Hell do us part.

Mother, mother, the child cries, but her cries go unheard, as they always do.

Mother is dead, mother is gone, mother is a dream and a lie; mother is the hunger curdling in her stomach, the mare-child of haunted blue eyes – mother is darkness and the sweet taste of death and the fragrance of rotting corpses; mother is herbs and thorns and rose-briar – and mare, yes, her slender body, her hatred moving like mating snakes in her veins.

Mother is everything she loves, everything she needs, everything she hates, and the madness deep-set in her ruined eyes.

The mare is yellow, marked, ruined; her mane slip-slides as cobwebs against her neck – matted, gnarled, silver wires against her dirtied coat. Kalleis, once beautiful, bleeds; her wounds are coated with filth; and yet, she does not seem to mind nor see.

The child sees things; the vision runs through her blood, glides into her conscious mind. She stirs; sedate, slurring, she moves quietly, hesitant as a deer.

Things shift and change; the fabrics of reality are rent apart; and she sees, with a mind that is not fully her own, the subtle connections of the world, how they move, how they shatter. She feels, because she cannot help it, the new euphoria that surges from her heart, crests, and dies.

Mother, mother, the child cries, but it is not her mother that she hunts, quick and light and ruined Kalleis, as she winds herself through the golden-light paths of the woods. Mother, mother, she calls, and it is for Gaia, Primordium, shard-Keeper, Earth-Mother, hers, that she cries; mother, mother!

And before hers, trapped in golden light, is the painted warrior, the broken one, the foolish one, who haunts her woods and her dreams with promises of hatred and sickness and hurt; bleeding, disgusting, hateful, lost, alone, Kalleis smiles;

And in a breath, she calls, Mother;

And around her the world becomes Hell, and she its master.

kalleis;
pain melted in tears, and was pleasure;
death tingled with blood, and was life.