excerpt - won't be buried alive
response prompt - wip, please refrain from critique at this time
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They met in the crumbling Past. Stone sank wearily into graves made of moss and mud, and roots pried the their rocky bones apart like she cracked open the shells of insects for their meaty insides.
Here, where the bees could not sing, she owned her own voice, though she so often forgot it, drowned under the endless song of Ruin. It hurt to be here, but nothing hurt like the bees, so she stayed to sate curiosity.
The traelle gnarled at her in a voice that grated on frayed ears and split her head open. Out came visions of an older traelle, limned in scars and spite and betrayal.
"I claim you," he told her in the voice of the forest.
"I claim you," she squawked back in kind, half memorised, half stolen now. Then she squinted, bewildered at the thin, hoarseness of them. They crackled in her ears like leaves left without water too long, and tasted small on her tongue. She remembered then: Ruin lived here once, but e left it; e will never speak in the Past ever again. She spoke alone: a rarity to indulge.
Being only hers and nothing else, this voice lacked even the good parts of the old traelle. Crouched low and frustrated, she strained to pull these out of the roots of the Past, knuckles shoved against her mouth for the effort.
When the young traelle sneered in a different voice, she latched onto it, mangled ears forward and owled face fiercely triumphant. Memory bit with unkind teeth hard enough to tear the truth free. These new-not-new words belonged to the hungry, the dead-eyed, the claimed, as much as to the traelle. These words she owned, too.
"You wanna fuckin’ live," he growled, "you’ll do what I say."
"You wanna fuckin’ live," she harped right at him—a fledgling harridan readied to screech—in delight, "you’ll do what I say."
"I find you first," she added last, testing next the voice that did not hum with bees or glow with fire but still bit and spit like a traelle’s: tasting her own and finding it not so small now. "I am all my own and you are mine."