raxeira [on hold]

e i r

(n.) help, mercy, healer

a goddess associated with medical skill in Norse mythology

"take me away, dry my eyes, bring color to my skies. take my hunger, light within, numb my skin."

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raxeria found me at dawn, shivering on the steps of the orphanage door. she draped a silken blanket of light over me, swashed with star dust. i watched her broken eyes, full of a foreign emotion — was it concern? — making her transparency even more sorrowful. i wanted to open my mouth and tell her that she shouldn't waste her emotions over me, lest she became more shattered than she already was. (how was it possible? how was it possible for such a young girl to already be exposed to some unspeakable tragedy?) a monster like me did not deserve someone's care. spawn that had crawled out of Grendel's den did not deserve an angel's touch, a brief breeze of light as comfort. i did not deserve to see my gray and blue monochrome world to be awash with shades of color.

i did not want to hurt her. i did not want her to meet the same fate.

i think she understood, but she did not leave. she stayed, like my shades, like my ghosts, like my bad luck. she stayed, a spark of light in my world of darkness, as if she were trying to etch some sort of carving onto my heart of misfortune. it was this moment that I understood that all the darkness in the world cannot extinguish a single candle.

i was darkness. i was not water or oxygen. Her light would burn, no matter how stifling my presence was.

she smiled at me, a small, thin-lipped etching on her face that seemed to fade onto her face. something malicious inside curled away and died. i could not stand it, her brightness. she had sucked away everyone's darkness and absorbed it into herself, making herself broken yet emitting light. she was the sun, lighting her surroundings up, illuminating life, but inside her seemingly dazzling appearance a deep void remained, yawning, bottomless, pools of infinite hopelessness. she was exhausting herself, burning herself out with every soul and story she touched and absorbed. i could not ask of her to eradicate my bad luck.

but even if I did not deserve to wake up to light, even though my fate was one on the other side, I craved it all the same.

because she made me feel alive. she made me want to live.

and then she started singing. it was such a matured voice, rich and melodious, with underlaying qualities of sorrow but hope, overlapping, intertwining, repeating. i could write words of appraisal about her voice but let me tell you one thing: it was the song of the gods, apollo's blessings cast onto her voice and the muses' charms placed in her vocal chords. i could not understand the words she was singing, but she was a little siren again, weaving the notes into my tendons, stringing it into my nerves, pumping into my blood vessels. i cannot describe it adequately. there is not enough words in the world to contain her voice. there is never enough words for beauty. what I can tell you that it was so otherworldy, a sound that belonged in the paradise above, that you do not feel anymore. all you feel is the sensation of combusting into light, of floating into a world of comfort. for the first time, I understood what it meant to be free, how it was to wake up and step back into a world of light.

raxeira, mercifully, was singing me into an eternity of peaceful death.

her voice had a certain healing power in it, and the warmth lingered when her voice was about to die out. she was drained, but I could not tell her to stop. my mouth seemed to be glued shut by the awe. my eardrums could not handle the beauty; my body was shaking and my lungs were caught with webs of light and sound.