The arrows of Eros fly true and pin you like a butterfly, the wound opening new worlds, new sensations. Worshipful silence, the ancient songs, take on a new meaning, a bright and shining semblance in your mind as he fills your thoughts even as your lips shape words of devotion to another.
A battle, a monster in the arena and a monster in the mind. On one side of the mirror, blood and terror. On the other, wine and fear.
Moonlight filtered dimly between heavy leaves as he neared the peak, sweat sliding down his back and stinging his eyes. He blinked the moisture away, before frowning and dashing it away with a hand. The other clutched the strap of his small kit - all the tools he’d need for tonight.
He could hear footsteps going thump-thump-thump somewhere else, outside his head, outside the dark. Far away now, then close. Far away. Close.
The pandanus on the river banks waved, not because there was a breeze but because the heat-haze shimmer made everything somehow less solid. Except for the heat and the sunlight, which were as real as a punch in the jaw.
But she had shown me the secret places tucked in the space between seconds, nestled in the crumbling mortar of the ancient stone walls. Pixies, faeries, redcaps, sirens and selkies; all sorts inhabited her mindscape and peopled our land.
The clouds were still plums and bruises in the sky, the sun obscured by their dark shapes, when the drifter floated past. A small furry brown bundle on a brown piece of flotsam, just another piece of the great river that curled slowly past their door.
