Sayre, to me, is the sea.

She’s cigarettes and red lipstick, and in the summer, large sunglasses pulling back her hair. She said that her favorite season is spring, and because she was fond of the feeling of mud beneath bare feet, the second aspect of this world I created was mud that reached the sea. This was before the sands, the meadows, and before she asked the question that I wish she never did:

“What do you think will happen if we cut the tether?”

Demanding. Sharp. It wasn’t a question of innocence, but of a challenger.

I deflected it, and over time it became:

                “Where do you expect to end up?” If I stayed in the world we were both born in instead of this one.

                “You’re not old enough yet, but you’ll see eventually that it’s nothing exciting.” To live and grow old in the world we were both born in.

                “What reasons do you have for dismissing this realm?” Convinced that once I crossed the threshold of adulthood, I won’t return here.

And this last one… This last one was the explosion.

                “… I don’t know.”

                I was wary, because all of our interactions had become prodding, prickling, and my attempts at deflection.

                “… You don’t know.” Sayre wasn’t convinced.

                “Yes, I don’t know. Not everyone has a reason for everything.”

                Sayre’s mouth twists into a bitter frown. “Everyone has a reason, but not everyone is aware of what it is.”

Like shrapnel, it seized me, and I seemed to have embodied a part of her spirit.

                I don’t want to lose to another one of your arguments.

                But since when am I ever able to think of the rights words to say at the right time? I bowed out again, “I guess.”

               But she kept pushing—

The south side where the sea was… Now caving into an abyss. The rich sapphire of its body rushing backwards as though being pulled down a drain. The air seems to churn… churning… And out breaks the wind that whips around me, yanking my hair all over my face.

It’s a phenomenon not known to this realm.

This is the realm you come to after drinking the water bought from the old lady at the witchcraft shop that no one frequents seriously.

This is the realm that will obey your commands, your vision, and how you mold it.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

This is the realm too mysterious to understand, for Sayre who first arrived before me, and for me who accidentally breached it and became an owner too.

But I know it is not a fluke of the realm itself, as though it grew a mind of its own.

A wavering—

In the air—

Like a tiny sheen of a sound, high-pitched…

Yet it isn’t a sound at all, and my ears hold nothing but the howling of the wind.

Just the tingle of a feeling—

It’s the feeling of—

I just know.

I just know this is Sayre’s doing.

                She just keeps pushing—

The wind strengthens, and I have to hunch over in effort against its weight.

What are you doing, Sayre? What’s going on?

With the sun rising from the east, and the breadth of stars that follows it towards the west, our realm is like a flat earth on which only we exist. It’s a second home, most of it risen by my hand because Sayre, though full of understanding of the theory, didn’t, as she said, “Have the imaginative capacity”.

In this knowing, I can taste its destructive desire. Beyond it, I taste the pulse of my own fear.

Sayre, are you tearing this place apart?

Alarm shoots through me as I drive my attention beneath my feet, feeling for that current, readying the framing and deliverance—

                “It seems to come from the birth of thought,” Sayre says, looking out the window that carries nothing but the thick of fog. “You know how thoughts are formed into words? It’s the framing of something that can’t be fully understood nor spoken into something tangible, and then delivered out into the space of physical existence…”

There is a strange, floating sensation of being enveloped; a viscous, gel-like feeling and I’m—

---

Mercredia:

“She’s not a real Subpar, she just has an attitude problem.”

I chuck another pebble into the sea.

Cas chucks his right after. “But if she seems like it, then isn’t she one?”

I glare at him. “So we’re judging people by appearances now? You know better than that.”

“Sorry…” He bends to pick up another, a fat one that fits his palm, hiding his face from view. “I wanted to pass on what I heard… You haven’t been keeping up with the Red Cards lately…”

“You’re not my Guardian.” I wrinkle my nose at him as he straightens. He doesn’t notice. “I’ve been with her… Trying to keep her in line…”

I don’t mention that it’s been a failure so far.

He studies the rhythm of patterns on the rock. “It’s nice you’re free now…”

The breeze messes the crop of his hair. You’re going to have to comb that thoroughly before we leave this beach… I can’t help noting that he looks so much younger with his sleeves rolled up, top two buttons undone.

He continues to weigh it in his palm.

“So what did you want to tell me?”

His eyes widen a fraction, as though to say, so soon?

---

Karma:

I vowed to myself at some point that I wouldn’t become a waste of life like that man. I thought that by doing so, I wouldn’t suffer the fated future of my cursed existence. I don’t even remember who he exactly was, but I believe he was simply saying that in his run-of-the-mill existence, he found no joy in chasing joy. We spend our lives on a treadmill, I think that’s how he said it, chasing happiness but only to chase the next prize right after.

What’s the point then? I think that’s what I thought. It might as well be that you never gained it in the first place.

But then I grew older and I realized that society had a different definition.

I was the ‘waste of life’.

Maybe that’s when it started, when I told myself I would attain what that man couldn’t. People attained their prizes all the time and rejoiced; not everyone is like him. I wouldn’t be on a treadmill, I would be fulfilled once I owned my sole prize…

I will defeat the limits of what I was born to be…

Right?

It’s hard to pinpoint the beginning, that root of the problem. Heroes have it so easy in stories; they know right away who is good and who is evil, who to fight and who to save. And they always make the situation better, with their powers and clarity of sight.

If I framed myself as a hero… Will I be free?

---

What… Was that?

It felt like… Holding this…

And I can’t even explain it…

Like a colour. The way you understand it, can point it out, and declare its name, but you can’t explain it beyond a name.

It felt like this sort of awareness… It felt like these were the thoughts of—

Sem, the person I invented out of conversation with Sayre about who would live in a forest of crystalline-leafed trees.

Another girl, whose name I don’t know, but I can sense Sayre’s energy behind her.

Sem, from the world we invented out of the fun of pretense—

This new girl, whose world must be of Sayre’s latest creation.

“Do you think I’m the villain, Amora?”

In the hum of the cabin wall, as though my hand upon it is a telephone cord, the whisper traveled up my arm in a brush, became her voice in my skull.

And I am submerged in that gel-like viscosity again.