saligiare:

There was no need for her to explain. What she said he had known - or hoped - already, and it had been for the very same reason that he had become so reluctant to ever leave the cool waters of the ocean again. 

And he knew he should be grateful and he knew that even the extra time he had received to spend with her had been a greater present than any party of him had ever hoped to dream. But it was difficult to thank whoever if the one that he loved was still so far out of his reach. He could not forget the cruel truth no matter how much he wanted to, and even in his dreams it finally came to haunt him.

His insides, all of his organs, his very soul clenched painfully at her words which lacked any mercy she could have given him. He stared at her and the vision flickered, like she was a candle about to go out yet fighting against the wind that suddenly blew from his lips. 

I am dead. Stop clinging to the image of me

Then what point was there in dreaming of her at all, when even in his dreams he was told to let it go and accept the truth already? How could she, of all beings in the entire world, say something like this to him? His fingers slowly slipped from her form and he gazed at her with the charring truth reflected in his blue eyes.

I am dead, and I am tired. Leave me be. There is not a single thing you can do.

He almost missed the words that she spoke after, so endlessly offended was he that in a sacred place like this she possessed the audacity to say such things to his face without shame. This was his dream. His escape. A small chance to relieve the neverending ache of his chest that tormented him each day and night. 

So much love, she said. He only caught fractions of her words by now. But what good is that love when you are not alive, not even in this one world inside my mind? 

With fear he noticed that the memory of her early days was slipping farther and farther away from him, just like her body did from his right now. If he could not make himself believe that she was more than a ghost, then that was what she became. A phantom, too far out of his reach to touch, yet still close enough to hurt him terribly. 

A soft word escaped him, a tiny thing, almost a whimper as he stretched out his arm.

“No..”

She couldn’t have known what her words would stir up. To her it was obvious, an accepted fact. That she was dead changed nothing for her. She still watched for him on the shore, still loved him with every fiber of her being. But for him it was different. She ached to have hurt him with her words, to find herself blurring in his arms. 

How else would she be here if she weren’t dead? He had not dreamed her into existence, she had come here on her own. To meet him, be with him in the small refuge they were given. She was more than just a memory here but not if he rejected her presence, doubted her. 

She looked at him and his quiet despair, longing to find those magic words that would ease his pain and reunite them. But she wasn’t good with words, had not needed them for so long. Death didn’t take everything but it took a lot. Pale ghostly fingers reached out to touch his face. “Leviathan…” A mournful, tender sound. “Don’t leave. I’m here, please let me stay. Let me reach you. I will do whatever you want, just don’t… Please. Not yet.”

saligiare:

He would not close his eyes, no matter what. It was but a dream, a wonderful illusion that should have been completely his own, yet the presence of his love had invaded even that secret, hidden part of his. She was there, though only because he had invited her in, and Leviathan feared that if he allowed for her to slip out of his sight for only just a moment, she would disappear gain.

“You are here. Liv. Could you hear me calling? Did you hear me cry? Liv.. my Liv..” Words escaped him. The oh so articulare sea serpent was at loss for things to say, mindless praise and adoration dripping from his lips and onto her cool skin, yet he wanted to talk about so much more. His thoughts, his feelings, his dreams, his anxieties - and her’s, of course. If he could only listen to her voice for one or two eternities..

His fingers smoothed along the curves of her body, feeling up the live pulse beneath her skin, the pointless breaths she took, the vibration of her beating heart. “Liv.. I miss you. I love you. I don’t know how I go on without you. It’s not fair. Did it hurt? Are you alright? Maybe I could..– I wished I could do something for you. Please. Let me do something.”, he pleaded.

His hurried words washed over her, a silver swarm of flitting worry and tenderness that engulfed her. She reached for him, endlessly searching for the solid warmth of a living creature. But here they were the same. Not because she had become more like him, more alive, more real. But because he had become like her, half a shadow, a projection of something that existed elsewhere. This was their middle ground, the compromise.

She took to soothing him, shivering with joy to be in his arms again. “Nothing hurts here.” Her voice ghosted over his skin like a gentle breeze, it sounded bigger than her. “Oh, my love, if only I could… I miss you, too. All that I am is missing you. I watch for you, in the waves. It is more than it was before. I feel the tides, I am the tides. I am the whales, and the reefs and the trenches in the deep. And I heard you.” She caressed the curve of his cheek, suppressing the sorrow that drenched her voice. 

Truth was that she couldn’t hear very much besides the surge of currents and the rush of water against stone. But she had felt it. Leviathan’s longing had pervaded the entire world, and all the oceans had fallen silent in grief. Everything had tugged on her to return, to will herself into existence. But she wasn’t strong enough for that.

She leaned against him, arms slung around him as if she was a mermaid dragging her beloved sailor to his watery grave. “There is nothing we can do.” She confessed softly. “Nothing to do for me. Please, I am dead. Look after what remains of me. I am there, in the caves and volcanoes and the icecaps. They know you. And the children. Please look after the children. I feel them and they know you, too. They sing of you. There is so much, so much love, silent and hidden but never dead. Everything moves in me.” She took a hard breath, tired by the attempt to explain herself. How to say it?

I have become the sea and all its creatures and now I am a mother at last.

“I love you, I will never be fully gone. Never. I am all yours.”

howtoserveaman:

Everything looked the same. No matter where he turned, wether he felt like he was diving up or further down, the lights did not change. Even when he broke through the surface of the cold water the sky seemed to merge right into the sea. There was no sun at the horizon, and no land. Robbed of every sense of direction, he janked his head from side to side until he felt dizzy and fell back into the labyrinth of grey swirling around him. 

But then her voice returned to him, a breathless whisper carried to him by the wind blowing underwater. And suddenly he knew again where he was going. Of course, there could have never been any other way. 

He followed the colours that flared up before him. Hues of blue and green and turquoise and sometimes just a flicker of milky white when a jellyfish as big as a blue whale crossed the path laid out for him. It was a beautiful way she sang for him there, making him wish that he could swim and explore it with her by his side. If only he would be with her already.

Time and space had no laws to follow within a dream. One moment he was still swimming, the next he had already grown legs and arms and lips that could kiss, and was stumbling up the shore and out of the water like he had been close to drowning. 

His love lingered in the air before him, leaving no imprints in the sand. Even in his dreams she was this ghost like figure, more dead than alive and more fog than flesh and blood. It was wrong, he realised, and for a moment it angered him so much that his mind had decided to remember her like this rather than to give her the strength and body she deserved. The emotion flared up at his fingertips when he reached out to touch her. This was his dream, for god’s sake. And he refused to imagine her like this even in his sleep.

And indeed, when his hand fell upon her chest it felt like he was touching something much more solid, much more real than she had seemed before.

“Liv.” He spoke her name like a prayer, his own voice far away from his lips yet loud and clear against the wind. His arms wrapped around her form - wrapped around as much as he could reach of her, every inch coming to be under his touch, turning her into more than just a phantom. “Liv.”, he said again against her neck, his own breath going right through her instead of being reflect. But she was there.

Her breath, icy crystals that crept up the back of her throat, escaped her in a soft rustle. With wide dark eyes she watched as the shape washed ashore, birthed by the spray and grey water. He was the center of the universe. Everything knew that. His gravitation was irresistible. Where he tread the bleak sand became real, what he touched was infused with color. He made life, he created everything he saw. She knew this. He had made her, too.

Liv waited for him by the edge of the waves, pale arms slowly stretching out towards her love. Everything she was, every shadow and shiver, grew in his direction, begging for his touch as flowers searched for sunlight. A shaky step forward carried her right into his open arms. 

And where he touched her she became. Her wisps of skin grew warm and more than thin sheets pulled hastily over her nothingness to give her form. She became a body in his arms, with a heartbeat and flowing blood. He filled her up with all he wanted her to be. He said her name until she was there, calling her to him even now. She followed his voice onto the brink between imagination and dark reality without delay.

“Leviathan,” Her voice was soft but not hollow when she answered him. It didn’t echo in her chest. When she wrapped her arms around him, she felt him right there. “My Leviathan, my one and only, my love.” She held him as tightly as possible, feeling him with her all her might. “I’m here, I’m here. I had to see you. I’m so glad you came to me.” She showered him in adoring words, her lips ghosting over his shoulder and neck, and the side of his head. My love, my love, my one, my only, my precious. “Thank you, thank you.”

howtoserveaman:

The reality of dreams had been question for as long as the Dreamlands themselves existed. To point out the difference between what existed in a single mind and what moved a hundred others stopped with the naming of its numbers. Was this world an illusion only because he was the only one to see it? Was a world created and caged by the mind less real than any other? And if it was not.. did that change anything at all about the meaning of its purpose? A sanctuary breathed into life by a creature for itself.

Grey waters all around. He drifted in the wet and could not name a single drop or fish that crossed his way. He, who knew every inch of every corner of every ocean in the world. This one was none of them, or maybe it was all the seven seas combined. Temperature and pH-value, depths, salinity, plankton. Attributes that passed the giant by as if he had never heard of them, had never even tasted the difference between one water and the other. Everything seemed grey to him.

So he swam through seas he had never known, dived with a hundred copies of a whale who had no name, and greeted sea gulls where none should have been. Of course it all made sense to him. He was exactly where he wanted to be. Except.. not quite yet.

The siren song that called to him was carried by sea foam. Though every time he opened his massive jaws to swallow it only the faint hint of an idea of a taste lingered on his tongue. Still he inhaled her voice until he felt like he could drink no more, and his heavy belly threatened to pull him down into the depths of the loneliest cave in the deepest trench of the coldest spot in the ocean. But oh, how he longed to find her!

Where are you?

A hoarse cry that shook the waters like a seaquake, and like a pack of wolves, a thousand whales suddenly howling with him. His tail sliced the ocean with every heavy flick, but the quicker he tried to swim, the more he felt old age and fallen angels gnawing on his bones. Maybe he would fall apart before reaching her.

I’m coming– I’m coming! Wait! Wait up for me!

His call reached her as through a wall of fog. The grey seas surrounded her like uncharted land she couldn’t cross. All her instincts left her behind on the wind-whipped shore, still waiting. The water was too thick, they told her. The way was too long. She would not make it. There was a threat in the depth she couldn’t measure, something that would grab her and drag her down the second she entered the waves. It was a frightening idea that something in the ocean could truly become a danger to her. 

But she understood. This wasn’t the sea. This wasn’t water. She couldn’t enter it because she didn’t have the strength to swim in it. She was no more solid than the mist that ate away at her from beneath and when his voice shook the scenery she shook with it. A needle prick of panic pierced her chest at the thought of dispersing into nothing before he could reach her.

She wouldn’t disappear or turn to smoke, not while her love was racing to meet her. And she could see him now. A rush of painful joy poured out of her, drenching the waters in sudden color, spilling towards him. He could hear her. All she had to do was call for him and he would come. 

His name echoed through the still air like a silver thread, guiding his way. She didn’t call it as much as she let her longing flow into the dead water and light his way. How she ached to dive into the sea and meet him. Her restless trampled the untouched sand as she writhed and fidgeted at the water’s edge. Again and again she cried out for him, but what would have sounded like feral screams to anyone else was nothing but pleas and quiet singing in the fog.

Then she saw him, clearer than before. Her own form shivered in response, trembling at the border of disappearance. But she wouldn’t go until he did. This was all for him. 

“My love,” Her voice drifted away from her like a sigh of relief. And really, what else could it have been? She had missed him so much. He had to see her now, reach her now, take her into his arms and never let her go again.

howtoserveaman:

Nothing happened. The days passed by as the weeks did and days turned into nights turned into day turned into nothing. Wandering aimlessly from place to place, seeking out the things that used to consume his time, Leviathan was slowly but surely growing furious with the absence of actual happenings. Something or someone had always been going on, for as long as he remembered. Hell and Heaven and all that mess in between - he did not remember it to be so terribly dull, so utterly boring. But now the serpent moved through the cities like a ghost painted grey, unseen by the rest of the world. No one cared and no one approached him - not for anything interesting, that was.

It felt like ages had passed since the last time he had used his actual voice. Leviathan still was not depressed. He was merely tired, above everything else. Tired and worn out and old. As if his bones were creaking like dry wood with each step, or he ran out of breath when walking only a little  too fast. He wanted to speak - his being was filled with so many words about so many things that mattered to him. But who would understand? Who would even care to try?

You are so, so loved.

A voiceless whisper echoeing through the halls of his mind, an opera house with only one person sitting in the audience with his eyes closed and lips open to breathe. You are loved. Even if he was going to forget her face again, this would never leave. Even on his death bed he would mutter them. These three words were stuck with him forever now, and yet they did nothing to warm his trembling heart. If not for them, he would have simply given up weeks ago.

As he laid on the open beach of a lonely little island, sand crawling into the cracks in his old scales and salt water lapping at his body, the Leviathan sighed out quietly, but it got him no relief. So he closed his eyes again. Sea blue orbs slid shut for no reason in particular. The demon had as little need for sleep as a stone did, but it was the only activity that was going to kill the time. Perhaps when he woke up the world would have changed into a different place and he was going to be the good old trickster he ought to be for the masses.

It was a rather philosophical question. Do the people we dream about know that it’s a dream? Is it their reality for as long as they exist? Are they just projections, as unaware of themselves as the shadows we cast?

She wouldn’t have known the answers. The sea air that raked over her skin tasted fresh but the sun on her skin didn’t warm her. She wasn’t even sure if there was a sun in the sky. She didn’t recognize the shoreline either. It was a grey landscape, with the sea rushing in as dark foam-crowned sheets rolling towards the beach. The sky went on forever and was empty.

She knew she was waiting for someone in the half-light. She could almost see him, a shape in the distance. She doubted she was real. She doubted she was truly here. The sand under her felt like nothing and the waves didn’t make a sound. Her body was not hers. It turned into smoke whenever her focus drifted. It didn’t matter. She didn’t exist for herself.

It wasn’t a sound that let her turn from the sea. It wasn’t a shout or a sudden tremor that left her body shaking. Colors began to saturate the world around her in a seeping progress. A core-deep knowledge took hold of her, woke her from her stasis and breathed life into her eyes. Her waiting was done and it startled her to be so sure of it.

–Leviathan.

Her voice drifted away from her lips as though she had no power over it. The name spilled into the wind-tossed air like steam on a winter night. She didn’t remember opening her mouth to speak. It was not her voice calling out after all. Her heart or her mind or whatever aching thing still fluttered in the dark had cried out in its stead, impatient and forever young.

Come to me, come to me. I can barely see you. Come closer.

---

                I was here for a moment. And then I was gone.

---

                                          _{I wish you all a long and happy life.}

When she had first heard them she had thought it was a headache, a passing flicker of weakness. It pulled at her like the receding tide but never quite reached her. It was a droning from the depths, a silent roar that pierced her skin her the chill inside. No matter what she did, the ghost could not ignore the call of her bones.

Down below she heard them creak. It was a hollow haunting sound. Through mud and stone it echoed, climbed towards the light and breaking through the surf. Her senses fell towards her tomb, aching to reunite with the body they craved. She felt it faintly at first, then more clearly. A terrible feeling of lifelessness inside of her. 

A current swept through her teeth, hot as sulfur, and burned in her throat. Tons of sand smoothed down her ribs and rested on her spine. She felt the rock that her skull had become, heavy and dead. She saw the blackness in the sockets where her eyes should sit. Gaping and desperate they stared at the dark water that surrounded her, swallowing warmth. Mountains had grown on her back and her open jaws were never empty. 

She shivered and reached up to touch her lips. No skin and flesh remained to her. Not even bone. All she felt was cold stone, solid and black. Her fangs hung like stalactites from the roof of her mouth. She felt them climb into her jaws and slip between her teeth. She felt like she would choke on them all, streaming like smoke, like ash and hot air, into her maw. 

There was an ache in this, a hollowness that pained her like tooth decay. She shivered and reached towards her grave as though she could exhume her body, free it from its torture. But endlessly they came and fell down her throat, paralyzing her. Her bones were caught beneath mud and silt, frozen in time and turned to stone. And in her throat, an inferno. 

She wanted to force her mouth to close, make her teeth fall shut like a portcullis, never to allow another trespasser. But she could not reach that far and her will brushed over her skeleton like a drift of cold water. Rock could not obey her. What body was this? Not hers, surely, not anymore. It wasn’t a body at all. Just a heap of fossilized bones. Just an old path into the deep, never to be blocked. Never to be moved. 

She flinched back, terrified by the knowledge and age that sat in her skeleton. She had never gone to Hell but they had made Hell of her. Her corpse was the open gate.

nxiise:

“I want 

           to feel the  w a r m t h  of 

  the sun 

          on my skin. 

   I want to be alive again. 

         But that’ll never happen.”