don't tell me this is dying

She doesn't know he's watched her pass before, as terrified to broach and interfere with Aionios's proternaturally animate anger as he'd been to take his own life in hand at any point in the past thousand years.

Pass, of course, is a dreadfully, pathetically euphemistic word for it. He's watched her writhe, a spitting venomous insect, around taunting scythes of life-again-death-again on such sighing fear and pride that the two strangle each other in his head, blended blood-blue.

She doesn't know the closest he's come to busting out the door of the Cloudkeep is the time she almost went belly-up.