as i count backwards your eyes become heavier still
Chapter 01: madrigal music is playing
Chapter 02: voices can faintly be heard
Chapter 03: please leave this patient undisturbed
Chapter 04: nothing is quite what it seems
Chapter 05: sometimes entangled in your own dreams
Music.
Addam has always associated Minoth with a steady sort of music - volatile, yes, perhaps dangerous if one is feeling whimsical, but constant, even familiar, in its strength. Low sounds, bassal strings and throated winds. Oh, such strength. So admirable. So...unfailing.
Unfailing. It's a funny sort of word, and of course Addam is not laughing. For that is the very present ailment.
He stills hears the music now, and he hopes Minoth does as well. Hopes that he can.
Hopes that that natural comfort has not, too, been stolen from him, no matter how faulted he may have been.
The voices of the Blades have not ceased, have not allowed Jin rest, but it's not his own silence that he's concerned about, now.
However he has treated Malos, used him, made best advantage of his almost literally god-given gifts and restrictions, suddenly he is presented with a new idea, one of respect and dignity and rights and righteousness.
Malos does not talk to him. One might consider that Malos has not ever talked to him, and he knows it is not right to assume whose voice it is he's hearing, whose pleas and will he must now carry out.
You cannot treat a Blade. You cannot tend to the Jewel of the Empire, the sword flying independent of the Crest's own shield. You cannot grant them hospice as you would a human, and you cannot catch their death as it floats primly away.
Mòrag knows this, and for hours at a time fights the urge to do just that. There is no need for excess emotion.
If she is there, she will see the passage from live to dead, from extant to extinguished. If she is not...she will not.
But will she be disturbing Brighid, wherever she is?
Selfish Lora. You were always only concerned with your own safety, the termination of your own path, and the promise Jin made to you also to fend only for that concern.
Haze shimmers, bright as she always has been. Almost as.
Not...quite as. Something is different. Something is bleak.
With a grim sigh, Lora moves to bring closed those golden eyes that search her soul-deep. The autonomy is fading back on its own autumn leaves, and this being before her has lost some of its lustre.
Who is she? Who was she? Why must Lora let her go, now?
She had always maintained it as her goal; her lie had been one of omission, and no more. Perhaps Nia's had been the same.
No, she never asserted the depth and validity of such a horrible truth. Even in dreams, she could not swallow the whole of it.
Perhaps they had dreamed of greater things - not sweet, nor soft, nor granted and pure, merely real.
Their sensibilities...so difficult to qualify, so impossible to quantify.
Nia feels that she has been just so merely trapped up in one of Pyra's dreams, and as she withdraws her hand, so disappears life.