purpleyin reblogged
Call’s May Favorites: Day Twenty-Six - Snowwest, Orpheus & Eurydice Au
Earth crunches underfoot as she treads carefully through the field, her breath misting before her eyes every time she exhales with a trembling sigh. She’s dizzy off the rising scent of petrichor in the air, something so off-putting and familiar from the world of the living that her steps nearly falter. Somehow she didn’t picture rain when she thought of the Underworld - she imagined bare fields and starving, parched grass poking its tendrils out of the earth to gasp for breath, tickling the bare feet of thousands upon thousands of lost souls wandering aimlessly.
But there is rain, a startling amount of it, in fact. Not enough to cause a downpour, but enough so that her clothes stick to her, her hair plastered to her forehead and face as rain slides smooth over her body like a second skin. The earth under her feet remains dry, oddly enough, but she’s long since learned not to question the strange happenings of the world, especially not when she herself has lost track of time and barely recalls where she’s walking.
How long has she been walking? She can’t recall but she wants to, maybe even needs to know. There’s a bottomless pit where her memories should be, dark and sunken and throbbing in the back of her mind like a gong with every careful prod. It’s not her fault - she somehow knows it’s not but she’s not sure why. She wishes she knew.
She has to keep walking, though. She remembers that much. Walking is important, life-changing, a miracle waiting to happen. Even if her toes fall off and her fingers go blue and frost coats her insides, she has to keep moving forward.
Perhaps this is what it’s like when you’re dead. Is that what she is? A roaming specter walking the earth until she loses all sense of time and place?
She doesn’t feel dead. She can hear her heart thundering under her skin, roaring in her ears.
And through it all, she senses someone there, in front of her, some distance away but not far enough that she cannot sense them. Something about this comforts her, more so than the dead earth and the rain and the hollowness rattling around her brain, and she thinks she smiles, if only for a brief second.
