the seas are alive,
and they are raging with monsters, old sport.
| based on the voyage of the dawn treader |
| BOOK TWO OF THE KING IN DISTRESS DUOLOGY |
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2816 BGA, Dark Ages
GRIEF WAS A SERPENT that latched itself upon your throat, coiling around your neck and squeezing hard, asphyxiating your lungs from the oxygen it needed. It was a monstrous thing that sank its fangs into its prey, bleeding it dry. It would stay, like a speck of dust refusing to be removed no matter how hard one would try to get it off. It begged to be seen, to be embraced, to be stomped on and later cradled in one's arms. It was glass broken into a million tiny shards that were embedded within your beating heart.
Sleep had grown into a stranger, life had become a blurry gray moving thing outside the walls one had put up around oneself. There's a blurred silence in the enclosed space around her. As if the world was standing still, holding its breath and waiting for a storm to pass by and wreak havoc. And she would listen, to everything, because she'd hear it all. The noises were kaleidoscopes, streaks drifting into one another. Yet she would sit there, and do nothing but listen. The tinnitus would never stop. So, she'd try breathing as much as possible through the rush of blood trickling from her ears and mind and soul. Sorry, sorry, I'm not always like this.
Jamie could still remember the first time she came to Narnia — falling into the dark, stumbling upon the living room of the Klanes. Yoringal was the first ever true friend she made, and Gerasmia and Vraios had taken her in as if she were their own. So many memories were made in that house, so many scars and wounds and lessons that had now been engraved in her brain. When Gerasmia learned of her son's fate in the battlefield, she, too, had become a ghost. Just like the rest of them.
Zhev, she had grown to love. They never shared intimate moments in public, nor did anyone ever question if there had been a fire between them. But they had their fair share of affections behind closed doors. To lose not only their son but also him, it became too unbearable. Especially when his body had never been found.
And now, she was waiting for the world to tip over into the jagged edge of a cliff and just . . . die.
"Jamie." A deep familiar voice spoke up behind her, just before she took another step off the edge. Averting her red-rimmed tear-stained eyes from the rocky depths below, she turned around to face the great lion. "You cannot live like this."
"That would be applicable if I had wanted to live, Aslan." Jamie croaked out, her voice barely above a whisper. The lion's face grew sadder, his eyes telling of a forlorn tale she could never be able to decipher.
"People come and go. We do not choose our fate. It chooses us. As for your friends, fate had decided it was time." Aslan said, careful with his words, but at the same time, truthful. "Life goes on, Jamie. It stops for no one."
