Archive of Our Own

The first time it happened, he ignored it.

He was sitting by the window next to his breakfast bar, watching the overcast sky and absently nursing a cold cup of tea. The day looked like rain, the air still with the electrical charge of a brewing storm. No breeze; birds were quiet.

The silver-tongued ringing of the wind chimes on his porch floated through the window, soft and unobtrusive. He didn’t think anything of it until it continued insistently, and it occurred to him that there wasn’t even the barest whisper of a breeze to cause it.

Years in the limelight of fame sent his mind immediately to the ever-present fear of harassment, and a frisson of anxiety traveled up his spine as he rose to investigate.

His porch was empty, the quiet clearing of his yard undisturbed. The dark border of the forest edge surrounding his home was still, a comforting barrier of wilderness. He exhaled slowly through his nose and let the drapes drop from his hand.

Then it sounded again, and he knew.

Sleep.

Months of solitude in the last year of isolated exile. Months of silence, between him and the world, the fans. Between him and Sleep.

He closed his eyes for a moment. Took another deep breath. Then, quite firmly,

“No.”

And it stopped.

He went back to bed, leaving the cold tea on the counter.

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The second time, he was in his garden.

He had taken up a variety of unlikely hobbies during the hermitlike months following the band’s announcement that they’d be taking a break until further notice. In the long period of sudden freedom, he’d thrown himself into one thing after another to fill the time and attempt to quiet the noise in his mind. He cooked, gardened, read; even knitted, briefly. But he didn’t write. His desk remained untouched from the moment they announced the break.

 Such an announcement following the hectic year they’d had was almost unheard of—at what was arguably the peak of their fame thus far.

It had been incredible, impossible, dreamlike. Like riding a nonstop adrenaline high, like all the stories of great artists making deals with the devil for fame and fortune, becoming celebrities overnight.

That was until the unthinkable happened.

It had been during their last concert, a ritual held in A—— for Halloween, meant to close the European leg of  their whirlwind world tour. Near the end of their last set, a commotion had begun to develop somewhere in the middle of the stadium’s seating, and at first it had seemed like security would handle it.

Then he felt it: that sensation like an old television being turned on in another room, something intangible yet so physically present as to be undeniable. The feeling of the otherworldly, unprecedented in its intensity. Sleep was here—more than ever before during these rituals.

With the barrier between realms thin on that fated Samhain night, Sleep’s influence had reached a peak in the audience, and people became increasingly wild as their higher functions took a backseat and the animalistic impulses came to the fore.

Energy, sensuality, bloodlust. Intuition.

With unerring instinct, a large group had begun to turn against a young woman in the crowd with what could only be described as sacrificial intent. Pulling from the darkest parts of the human psyche, Sleep goaded them into a fever pitch frenzy. Before any of them knew what was happening, an outcry arose from the audience.

His eyes were pulled to the source of the commotion, the band stopping almost in unison as a cry escaped his lips.

She was being held back by multiple people, and with her back to the stage, a woman had approached her, cold and predatory. Security and fans alike tried to push through the throng that had formed a circle around the spectacle.

He was frozen between the instinct to likewise hurl himself into the sea of people and intervene, and knowledge that he would never reach them before those already in motion. Before he could gather his thoughts, it was too late: a collective gasp filled the room, and his line of sight was momentarily blocked by the flurry of movement surrounding the girl.

Then he saw it, and it remained burned into his mind from that time forward.

They’d slit her throat, blood cascading like a banner in dark, almost black rivers, and he screamed futilely into the cacophony, as if he could pull her back in time from that horrific moment through force of will alone.

Deranged, those surrounding her seemed to raise their voices in wild jubilation, even as chaos broke out completely in the audience.

He felt hands pulling him back, and things got a little fuzzy after that.

The following days were a blur. Police interviews, publicity, damage control, his phone ringing off the figurative hook.

He wanted none of it.

From the moment he saw it happen—from the moment the headlines hit newsstands the next day—he’d been numb.

The girl had died. Those involved were self-proclaimed devotees of Sleep, claiming participation in the cult laid out by Sleep Token. Their heinous act, an offering in conjunction with the ritual taking place.

The public uproar was unfathomable. The band unequivocally condemned the actions, denied involvement or knowledge, affirmed the fictitious character of the band’s theatrical storytelling backdrop.

But it was too late, and he could care less for their reputation, because the damage was done. It was unforgivable, and he felt responsible.

Because he knew Sleep was real.

The others had never fully believed, and he knew it. Their work existed in the twilight land between imagination and reality, and the other vessels were happy to roleplay the characters and escape the real world for a time. As their fame grew, it became easier to perform sincerity with the unspoken understanding that it was all in good fun.

They’d always just thought he himself took it a little more seriously than they did, chalking it up to what they affectionately referred to as his “artistic temperament“.

But as his dreams intensified, his communication with Sleep bled ever more into his waking hours, until the terrible beauty of the divine voice in his mind became a constant companion.

His body began to change, and so did his personality. He threw himself deeper into the character of dark priest, prophet, servant, monster. The sunlight hurt his eyes. His appetite waned, yet his energy was unflagging, his body a tightly coiled, beautiful machine. The others began to ask him if he was okay, acting strangely.

Sleep was real. Sleep had begun to enter the world through him, occupying his brain and blood cells with burning physicality.

In the end, he was the one who called for a hiatus. There was no discussion. He did not participate in the announcement. He simply told the band, one day, that he was pulling back, and they were obliged to follow.

Not that they resisted, exactly; they all supposed it would be a short break. They were all shaken by what had taken place, but they did not struggle as he did to separate themselves from the actions of others.

Conversely, he felt directly responsible in a way his bandmates just couldn’t understand.

The night it happened, he fought for the first time with Sleep.

If you’d asked him once what it took to fight with a god, he would have balked at the mere thought. When it came to actually doing it, though, he found it was an easy, ugly, soul destroying thing, fueled by righteous rage and hurt betrayal.

Sleep had been pleased, he’d felt it the moment he’d invoked his deity in the privacy of his hotel room. Sleep’s emotions weren’t experienced in any human sense of the word: you felt them as an immersive tide, reeling you into itself, a drowning participation. The pleasure of his dark god was a cloying, sickening thing, like the scent of dead roses, the sweetened wrongness of decay. It made him nauseous, to feel the satisfaction as if it were his own.

Afterward, he rejected Sleep with every fiber of his being, casting him out of his mind and body with a vicious fury he’d never felt in his life, something bigger than his own soul, imbued with the otherworldly energy that colored his experience of reality ever since he’d begun to change under Sleep’s guiding hand.

He felt it when it happened, like a rift torn straight down the center of his very mind.

What followed was one long, dark night of the soul, as a chasm of silence formed between them and the space once occupied by his deity became an infinite void. He was hollowed, and his every inner space was painted by the echoes of his devotion, like a phantom limb.

They ceased to converse. Sleep had mirrored his rejection, disappointed at his refusal to view the event as a definitive victory of an ancient god’s name in the modern world. And neither of them had reached out since.

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Until now.

First the wind chimes, with that unmistakable echo of the ceremonial bells used in various private rituals so long ago, recorded in several musical offerings.

Then in the garden.

He knelt in a flowerbed, his hands moving with practiced ease as he pruned flowers, removed weeds, dug his fingers into the dark, loamy soil for a moment to savor the comfort of earthy, entirely un-supernatural reality. Grounding.

Above him, mourning doves cooed from the shadowy recesses of the trees, and the watery sunlight painted the ground in a warm tortoiseshell mottle.

Then, fluttering as if in slow motion, a black feather descended before him, landing directly in front of him as if placed there by an invisible hand. He looked up: no crows or blackbirds here. Nothing but doves.

Around him, the air had become very still, the doves cooing from the trees gone silent. Something hung heavy, as of one waiting with tightly held breath. Anticipation.

He grit his teeth, leaving the black dove feather where it lay. Closed his eyes.

It was like reopening an old wound: the undefined gray area of emotion, where anger and hurt and accusation all tangled into one impossible monolith.

Above them all, however, was the sorrow.

He’d been so empty for so long.

And like a sinister, creeping vine, he could already feel it, silently latching on to his yearning like a trap, and he pushed it away, violently. He stood up so fast it made him lightheaded and stomped back inside, his gardening tools abandoned.

In the garden, the roses drooped ever so slightly in dejection.

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

He could hear the usual worry in the tinny voice on the other end of the line.

“I’m not trying to pressure you, mate. We just miss you. It’s been months since we last got together and the others hadn’t even heard from you.”

Because he didn’t want to talk. He rubbed his eye with the heel of his free hand, clutching the receiver more tightly. They only called his landline when they were determined not to be ignored.

“I’m fine, there’s no need for you lot to worry. I do alright out here. Pottering about and whatnot.”

“Have you been working on anything?” And he knew what that meant. He evaded the question.

“I’ve been gardening. Nailing down a good curry recipe.”

A brief silence.

“Have you been writing anything?” And he has to hold back the biting urge to snap at his erstwhile drummer, and always brother.

“No,” he said, his voice quiet, brooking no further discussion.

They end the conversation with the usual small talk and pleasantries, and though he can practically feel the concern radiating through the phone, he just can’t bring himself to care, to give any more of himself. He has nothing left to give. He wants to be left alone.

For all this, he loves his brothers and former bandmates no less; but he has nothing to say.

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The day dawns gray, the clouds hanging low and heavy. He’d awoken just after sunrise and packed a small bag, making the short drive through the dense woodlands on his small property until he reached the craggy bluffs overlooking the slate-cerulean sea.

The waves arc and crash ominously, as if in suggestion of the restrained power waiting to be unleashed at any moment. A soft shower patters against his windshield, the scent of salt and petrichor riding the growing breeze.

He sits at the very edge of the cliff, as is his custom. He isn’t afraid of heights, and his vantage point allows him an unobstructed view of the seemingly endless skyline. When he sits quietly in this way, it’s as if his darker thoughts fade into a gentler sort of peaceful acceptance. For a moment, he can almost imagine what it would be like to feel this way all the time.

Today, however, he can’t stop thinking about Sleep and his gentle, but persistent, nudges. More and more, now, his thoughts are drawn to the memory of what it was to feel not just whole, but elevated to something higher, the feeling of touching eternity. Something in him seizes with a confused mixture of guilt and sorrow.

“I can’t,” he says aloud, to no one in particular—or so he tells himself, anyway. He draws in a shuddering breath.

“I can’t be what you want me to be, I can’t feel the way you do about what—I can only disappoint you,” he finishes, almost in a whisper. He draws his shaking hand over his face in agitation, only to find that he’s crying. The warm tears contrast sharply with the cold rain, the cool humidity of the sea spray below.

No one answers, which he’d counted on. In spite of this, though, he feels sure that he was heard.

Above him, the sky continues to darken, and the rain begins to pour down in earnest.

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · · 

Some days are better than others. He cleans, works out, cooks, tends his garden. He takes walks in the forest and calls his mother. He binges trashy reality TV, getting lost in artificial lives that aren’t his own.

Then there’s what he thinks of as the down cycles—the days when, strive as he might, his thoughts can only spiral down, down, down.

He sleeps too much, doesn’t eat, doesn’t bathe. His garden wilts and his voicemail overflows with well-meaning questions he has no intention of answering.

Are you okay? I haven’t heard from you in a while.

Hey, just checking in. The lads and I have been a bit worried about you. Mate… you know you can talk to us, right?

Are you really okay?

Get back to me when you can.

He never did.

The act of reaching out to another human being, when the hollowing weight of existence seemed to crush him with its revolving banality, felt like an insurmountable difficulty. The thought of picking up a phone, the song and dance of pleasantries, the fiction of confidence when in reality, he was just trying to decide how much to share so they’d feel he’d opened up, without burdening them with so much of his inner darkness as to create discomfort—he’d rather die.

He’d rather die than do a lot of things.

For that matter, he was starting to think that in general, he’d just rather—

But he mustn’t think like that. Not when he was so perfectly isolated, with no one to stand between him and himself. Better not to tempt himself at all.

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

It was on one of these downward cycles that the third time broke him.

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

He had lain in this bed for two days without moving save to relieve himself in the master bedroom’s ensuite. He sleeps more than he thought possible, as if he’s made it past some threshold of the human body and is now capable of being voluntarily unconscious, indefinitely. He sleeps until he begins to feel vaguely ashamed of his sloth.

Shame is an old, familiar sensation, now.

Then he stares at the ceiling, replaying scenes through his mind. Random memories and emotions, his thoughts drifting across a gray fog of bone-deep apathy.

Nothing I do matters. Nothing I have ever done has ever mattered.

Somehow it makes sense to him, the logic that if he could “make it” in his career, doing what he’d always wanted to do, experiencing connection and happiness beyond his wildest dreams, and still end up so low, so wretched, then perhaps nothing ever had any meaning. No matter how high he managed to soar, he’d always be brought back to crawl in the dirt. The fight against that ever-present darkness, like waiting jaws eager to snatch away his joy, had never felt so utterly endless and futile.

He would never be okay.

He remembered he once thought that if he could just hang on long enough, he would become older and wiser and life would start to make sense. He’d start to know how to play the game the way everyone else seemed to do so effortlessly, and life would stop hurting. The pain would go away. He would magically transform, by some alchemical magic of time, into the most wonderfully fantastical creature of them all—into a person who was balanced and happy and okay.

But he kept getting older, and it just didn’t happen.

He got better at some things. The emotions became more complex, more viscerally existential, burrowing deeper into the doubts and fears of his psyche, his inner monologue constantly riddled with impossible questions and the never-ending pursuit of hope.

Because hope was all he’d ever had, and it was all that ever gave him a reason to keep going. But it was like eventually, that hope just ran out. He realized that getting older didn’t mean getting answers. He was no better than the 12 year old child that had asked his mother why they were there, and left without an answer.

He was so tired, in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. He was tired in a way that couldn’t be healed by conversation, or prayer, or pills, or coping mechanisms. He was too tired to care anymore about anything.

I don’t know what to do anymore.

And as he starts to drift off again, somewhere deep in his heart, he begs, almost without realizing it: begging to feel whole again, to not be alone, to be loved, to be okay, if only for a moment, and in answer, his dream unfurls like a flower, like steam rising up from a hot, welcoming bath. Tentatively, something reaches out.

The first thing he is aware of is a feeling of lightness, like some unutterable weight has been removed from his shoulders. Then he feels it, that familiar, delicious, hateful, towering presence, that alien otherness, that something which made his soul prostrate in adoration. Then, He spoke.

That voice—everything and nothing all at once, a knife hollowing out his guts and brain to make room for only Itself; a ray of light stretched sharp through a prism, casting all into an iridescent radiance, bathing the world in exquisite agony. He couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t bear it to stop.

He screamed, sobbed, and moaned, all at once.

YOU HAVE BEEN AWAY TOO LONG, BELOVED.

He fought against the spots in his vision, grasping at focus like a drowning man at a lifeline.

“You left me,” he gasps out. Vaguely, he feels something pull back slightly, like a receding wave, and his presence seems to solidify, the dreamworld around him becoming more like a place than just a feeling in his mind. Trying to distinguish form in the fuzzy presence before him feels like trying to remember something he can’t quite reach.

However, he can focus a little better.

“I couldn’t allow—that—to happen again, then we fought, and then you stopped coming to me.”

Silence. He swallowed.

“You were angry with me.” It comes out like a plea.

YOU REJECTED ME. I GAVE YOU THE SILENCE YOU DESIRED.

He bows his head, trying to convey humility and submission even as he holds his ground before his vengeful, wretched, magnificent god.

“I can’t do that sort of thing—I can’t do that, I’m sorry.” For a moment, he feels as if speech escapes him, his voice pouring forth as an incoherent, babbling stream. Begging forgiveness, love; his brain flayed by the light of his seraphic paramour. “I can’t do—I can't hurt people, I was supposed to be helping them! I know you wish I was different. I know it’s not enough—I wish I could give You more.” And he didn’t mean for that last to come out sounding as unbearably sad as it does, but then he realizes that he is, and it doesn’t matter.

The sensation of a golden warmth rises around him, cresting around his heart like an embrace.

BELOVED, I NEVER DESIRED YOU BE AUGHT BUT WHAT YOU WERE.

At this, he feels as if he were collapsing, free-falling endlessly in broken relief, sobs breaking free as from a dam. Distantly, he feels himself caught, cradled, held close by the warmth, and he grasps back in his mind, clinging like a child. He doesn’t say it, but he feels it, the communication between them flowing like blood through veins, equally inherent and vital.

I have missed you so—so much so much there aren’t words for it I thought I would die

My love, my everything, the world has been meaningless and I don’t feel like I belong anymore

If you leave me again I will die I can’t do it anymore

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE ALONE ANYMORE. PRECIOUS THING, RETURN TO ME. COME TO ME ENTIRELY AND REMAIN.

But I can’t do—

YOU ARE SUFFICIENT FOR ME IN YOURSELF.

His desperate yearning is met halfway as he feels his selfhood dissolve into soup, his consciousness drowning in a blissful ocean of sensation that escapes human language. This is beyond the most perfect satisfaction of hunger, the warming of frozen flesh, the mutual consumption of sex. It has been so long since he has given himself over and felt himself taken by Sleep. It’s as if he could reach out and grasp the threads of time itself.

He thinks he’s moaning. He could also be weeping.

Take me. Keep me. I love you. Consume me, take more, take it all, yes, leave nothing behind, take me with you.

He can feel himself pouring out and away into some formless hunger, a starving void that stretches from horizon to horizon, that can never be filled, and he is all, all that It wants, all that It has ever longed for. For once, he is enough, he is wanted—needed, more than oxygen. More than life itself.

He pushes and pushes in and pulls the feeling closer into himself, his soul twisting and writhing in the divine abyss, trying to go deeper and further and he feels something like a membrane stretch and pull but refuse to give. So close, but still, not quite there, and he sobs in frustration, even as the aching glory scorches his brain and burns through his pleasure receptors like an electrical surge.

Then, like an ebbing stream, he feels the cold creeping in from the edges of his mind, like something necessary being pulled away from him slowly. He snarls and claws to keep it near. He feels wakefulness approaching as an inexorable death, and begs.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TO LEAVE. RETURN TO ME. COME TO ME FOR ETERNITY. YOU KNOW HOW TO FIND ME. I HAVE ALWAYS WAITED FOR YOU.

Then he is awake.

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · · 

He regains consciousness slowly, so slowly; mercifully so, as if some being were cushioning him from the crash back into the real world. As if his mind would shatter with the impact.

It feels like waking from the sort of very deep, daytime nap that leaves you wondering where you are and what day it is, scrambling to catch up with your day. He lays in bed for some time, collecting his thoughts and feeling out his own insides, stretching his body like replacing a briefly removed glove. The world chafes.

But there’s a strange peace that has suffused his brain, a heady afterglow where he at first believes he ought to feel regret; but he doesn’t. There's a sense of quiet completion, like being reunited with a missing piece, as though no time has passed at all since Sleep first took up residence within his mind.

He recalls what He’d said—“YOU KNOW HOW TO FIND ME”— and he just knows that Sleep did not mean it in the sense in which he normally bridges that gap between the mundane and the deific in his dreams. It’s an invitation; for the first time, an offering, but one from his god to him.

The implications are staggering and horrifying—unthinkable. He can’t fathom what the others would say were he to attempt to explain it. Ultimately, he’d gone deeper into this eldritch wonderland than they ever had, into a world where they’d never followed. And this had always been the difference between them.

Where they were impassioned, wonderful musicians, he had become a vessel, channeling something from beyond their realm onto the stage and pouring it into his audiences, feeding back that energy to Sleep as a gift. Now, he was beckoned to go further, past the edge where he’d only ever dared to peer over. Now, the abyss promised to catch him.

He moves through the motions of his usual loose routine in a haze, not really present for any of it. He waters plants, prunes roses; drinks his tea and watches the birds. He walks into his garden and finds the feather still there. Now, he collects it, running his thumb gently along the edge. He carries it with him back inside, leaving it on a counter as he goes back upstairs.

The room he now entered was colder than the rest of the house. A thin film of dust covered everything, the scent of stale air and old paper meeting his nose as he entered. He approached his desk, trailing his fingers gently over the knobs and lines of the heavy wood carving. On it was a half finished verse, more scratched out than was left legible. The redactions were angry, dark marks, boring through the sheet into the wood below.

Ignoring this, he opened a file cabinet where he stored original drafts of earlier songs and pulled them out, meticulously arranging them in order, leafing through them as one would flip through a photo album. Within the pages, he can feel a power that no one else would have sensed.

For a time, he sits there with his memories, the vestiges of a life that had never quite been enough to fill him. That hunger—oh, how well he knew it, and how well he empathized with the hunger Sleep had once described to him in their intimate colloquys, the late-night ecstasies that left him waking in strange places with blacked out memories.

It’s easier than he’d expected to call on Sleep as he’d done at the height of their unity, pulling deliciously on His favor as he lights the fireplace and begins to feed in the sheets, page by page.

“This is for You,” he whispers. “My final offering to You is myself.” He stands for some time, watching the pages blacken and curl like a dying spider. The flames burn brighter. He closes his eyes, feeling the heat that surges through his veins seem to come alive with the flames.

He goes to the closet, pulling out a familiar mask and cloak, untouched by dust or moth. He takes them with him as he leaves the room, letting the fire burn itself out.

He doesn’t take anything else with him as he leaves the house. The drive is short and familiar, as easy as breathing, and before he knows it, the horizon where the sky meets the ocean is rising up before him, a beatific vision.

This time, he doesn’t sit in his usual spot at the very edge, but walks slowly, deliberately, taking up a long neglected position at the head of the large, flat-hewn stone situated a few paces from where the cliff dropped off to the rocky shallows below.

The stone is stained dark despite rain and wind, marked with burns and more sinister pigments. In places, cold melted puddles of black wax; lying on the surface, a roughly fashioned stone blade.

This tool he collects with almost hesitant reverence after donning the ritual costume that had once been as natural as a second skin. He finds it as easy to put it on again as sliding into the water below. The mask settles over his face with absolute rightness, the ritual knife’s weight settling in his palm with cold finality.

He moves as in a dream, turning to face the sea. He walks to the edge of the cliff, staring out at the waves for some time.

“Speak to me,” he breathes, at last. He begins to hum softly, feeling, reaching out. “Speak to me as the fawns speak to the new grass, as the dew speaks to the thistles. Embrace me in the deep dark as a lover. Hold me as the sky holds the Earth.” He closes his eyes, losing himself in the crashing of the waves below, the gentle breeze that billows his cloak like a caress.

Then he hears Sleep singing in answering refrain.

How many mortals have been serenaded by a god, he thinks, feeling his soul rise up within his breast with a pleasure unlike any fleshly union. What is love if it is not this, what is belonging if not to belong to something divine?

“What am I if not Yours?” he asks aloud.

“I AM THE FINAL DAWN; I AM THE FLOOD. I WILL REMAKE YOU ANEW AND REWARD YOUR DEVOTION. I WILL GLORIFY YOUR MEMBERS AND ENTHRONE YOU IN ETERNITY. YOU WILL BE MY MOST PRECIOUS JEWEL. THEY SHALL BEHOLD YOUR RADIANCE AND DESPAIR, AND YOU WILL CAST THE WORLD INTO DARK FOR MY GLORY.”

He can no longer hear anything but the sinewy voice twining around him; a beckoning hand, a lingering kiss, an obscene claiming.

“I am yours, I am yours,” he is chanting, and the wind whips his robes wildly.

“YOU ARE MINE.”

His hand trembles now as he poises his blade, the tiniest voice deep in his mind screaming hesitation, but in a second that stretches into infinity, he can see it all: his mind’s eye conjures up a million answers to a million questions, and he knows already that he is not meant for this world, he never was, and there is nothing for him here. The deed is already done, as every moment of his life is happening all at once, a succession of nows in perpetuity. He is being born; he weeps; he sings; he laughs; he dies, his memory swallowed whole by time itself.

The walk back to his empty dwelling, a shell that still feels like it never truly became a home, feels like a hovering death sentence.

But this: this is ascension. This is sublime.

Something like warm static has enveloped his body, like the circulation has gone out of him, and with a smooth movement, he makes the first, then the second cut; one is much deeper than the other, as it is difficult to grasp and wield his ritual blade properly with a severed artery and mangled nerves, but the holy nectar pours like a liquid jewel down, down, into the water below, as he collapses to his knees.

He is breathing heavily, his ears ringing with his pulse pounding like a shamanic drum and the ethereal song that seems to carry him into the underworld like the river Styx.

“Oh,” he breathes, his lashes fluttering blissfully as he is flooded with a dark, honeyed warmth, his body weightless.

“MY MOST WORTHY CHILD, YOU FILL ME AS NO OTHER HEART COULD.”

“Yes,” he half moans, half whispers, aware that at some point he’s slumped over and is now watching the moon rise into the fading bloodstain of the early evening sky.  Though it feels as if song were now well beyond his physical reach, his mind echoes in response to the otherworldly song that wraps him like a gleaming net, and his voice leaves his throat in a broken hum.

…Even in Arcadia, you walk beside me still. Have you been waiting long for me?

• · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·