Warnings: 2nd Person PoV, Angst, Mild Horror
You feel it inside you. Inescapable.
Not the Siren's Call. It is the whole ocean.
You never slept well. Now, you do not sleep at all. Your body no longer tires. It does not need to eat. A blessing you had once prayed fervently for to a god you did not believe in. You do not feel the fleeting touch of divinity on your mottled, withered skin.
Nor do you feel an absence. For something is filling you, occupying you as quickly as it can squeeze what remains out from your gasping mouth with long, dark tendrils. It is cold. It is suffocating. And it is mercilessly alien. So alien that you find yourself forgetting to respond to your little sister when she calls your name.
No. That is not your name.
That is an old meaning for an old word. What you are now is old too. Old and New. New as a bright-eyed tenant seeing possibilities instead of plaster. Old as the birth of the stars. But stars are not as comforting to be as they were to behold, glimmering far, far above on those long nights you spent hugging the burnished steel of the rooftop's slipshod railing till your curled fingers began to freeze around the bar and you had to pull hard to free them.
You pull this time.
You do not come free.
You toyed with the darkness one too many times. The icy trap has decided it will relinquish you your freedom no more. Panic surges hot in you. Hot enough to melt ice. Not enough to melt metal.
That is being. (That is value.) What all living things are. (What all living things have.) What you knew yourself to be and what you feel slipping through your grasp. (What you knew yourself to have, at one time, only because you were always holding your hands out to parcel it out till there was nothing left.) What you feel yourself being robbed of. (Robbed of even your hands, now. They give and receive no warmth. How much was left to give?) How much would it take?
"...Have me then!" you want to scream yourself raw at the nothing inside. "Take my body! I never wanted this damned thing anyway!" You lie your fear away, sobbing like a child at haunted memories that continue to stain the waters around the increasingly small island inside you called human. "As long as you release me...!"
But the thing only shakes its head, a dark mane of cold fire flickering. It has you at its mercy. But the night star is not all powerful. You see in the vortex of its baleful eye that it cannot live fully on its own. It encroaches. It conquers. It does not eradicate.
And it needs some part of you to stay alive.
A molten core to crust over, buried a dozen layers deep.
That is not your name. But that is its name.
And you will never be free of it again.
