in these breaths . knox

[pogue]

K  N  O  X    D  E    S  O  L

All that time spent running from Four and yet you’ve somehow managed to end up right back in the waves.

She’s dragged you into the shadows, unaware that that is exactly what the shadows would want, another corpse to drown and another heart to stop. It’s the cold that seeps in first, just after your words become only mumbles and whimpers of pain cried into her arms. It washes over your body as you lay there, Cypria’s arms clenched against your chest and your head lulled to the side, breaths choked out in half-hearted wheezes. The ice pierces underneath your skin, slowing every muscle and vein and crying heartbeat until they are nothing more than water droplets lost in the ocean, a leaf carried in the wind. Overwhelmed and forgotten, buried in a coffin of their own design.

You can still hear the screams, hear her screams and cries thrown out into the stadium, can still hear the spectators cheering on your death. But when you move your eyes to find Cypria’s you’re only met with a blurry mash of colors and shapes, dripping static into your eyes amongst the little black dots that float at the edges of your vision. The world spins and spins until you’re forced to look back down, finding only the blurry bloody cloth of Cypria’s uniform as you choke out tears, the last bits of warmth sliding against icy skin.

I want to go home, you want to say, and you only realize after you think it that you’re picturing One. Your own body fails you, though, words choked out and falling to the dust below.

”I-“

You feel another piece of you leave, snatched up in the mouth of a beast of war. The tears hit your cheeks, streaking down against a chorus of your own whimpers, burning against your skin. You clench the torn cloth of Cypria’s armor in your fist, feeling the fabric only for a moment before it’s lost to the same ice and dizziness that you’re drifting deeper and deeper down into now.

Your father had always taught you that it would be ready to swallow you whole if you let it. That voice in the back of your head, ever unsure of what you stood for and what you would fall for, tells you that you should have listened to your father better.

But you think of Calder, stammering through an ocean of trust and you think of Cypria, her screams and cries sounding more and more like home as you lay there, ocean waves washing over your form. You’re glad you didn’t listen to him.

Your head has fallen softly down against Cypria’s chest, too afraid and too lifeless to glance down at what is left of your body. You can hear her heartbeat, fluttering rapidly in the distance and fighting against her own cries. Buh bum, buh bum, buh bum-

But it’s growing softer and softer the more you listen to it. And the world is getting darker now.