#shhhhhh this is only ambiguously canon and I wrote it between midnight and 2am last night but yeah
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making sense is overrated (excerpt):
Lya crested the last ring and stood once again encircled within the crumbling walls of the garden where she had first awoken. She saw two things at once: what had been and what was. Nesotor’s garden, groomed and shining, a carefully-kept haven where she would come sometimes to pray. Where she had met Trip for the first time, and then where she had met him for the first time again.
She put everything else that had happened there out of her mind, and pressed forward to the center, forcing her way through the bushes that were trying to be trees, and the ferns and the dying flowers, until she came to the center, all overgrown with grasses and crawling vines.
The place still smelled of sleep, in some indescribable way, and with a little imagination she could almost see a faint depression in the ground cover marking the place where she had lain asleep. A strange longing welled up inside her to simply lie back down and let the garden claim her again, to let the leaves shield her eyes from the sun and the rain, and for stems to weave over her like a blanket.
But instead, she pulled out her lighter and set the place on fire.
It choked and burned green and smokey, but eventually, inevitably, it burned. And Lya stood on the crumpled wall and watched.
The flames took their merry time to fizzle out, but eventually reduced to small pockets that ate themselves out of fuel, quailing at the woodier bushes that had a better memory of yesterday’s rain. She hopped off the wall, and made her way amidst the cinder-filled air to the freshly revealed hole that yawned wide into the earth in the place that Nesotor’s door had once waited.
The first few stairs were a bit worse for the wear, having had their stone seal traded for only the overgrowth, but once she had skidded down a ways, the place was much as she remembered. She didn’t bother with a lantern; her eyes would adjust in time.
She felt rather than saw her feet touch water: the resistance against her step, and then, a moment later, the wet seeping into her boots. As if roused by her ripples, the water lilies, whose glow had been nearly imperceptible, brightened insistently as she sloshed past.
Knee-deep now, and looking down as she approached the pedestal, she was neither surprised nor unsurprised to come face to face with herself.
The Other Lya floated just below the surface of the dark water, eyes closed, hair swirling lazily round her head. She was lit by a perfect white beam from the sky crystal, and as the Awake Lya bent over her, a shadow fell across her stoic forehead.
Had the Other Lya’s nose and mouth not been already submerged, she might have been tempted to hold her under and see if she would drown. Instead, she merely laid two fingers on her forehead to see if she was real, or that is, if she had substance.
The Other Lya’s eyes opened. They were the same familiar true black of her eyes in every mirror, even as they seemed to glow with a fierce radiance, a very bright darkness.
The Awake Lya stared back. The eyes did not comfort her, not exactly. If anything they made her more afraid. But all at once she understood, and she bent down and kissed herself, not because that was the trick, but because she couldn’t help it.
Everything spun around her then, and when she had finished turning inside out, she sat up, peeling wet hair from her cheeks, and blinked in the sudden sunshine.
#my writing#second chance wip#character: Lya#shhhhhh this is only ambiguously canon and I wrote it between midnight and 2am last night but yeah#but do you understand#the imagery#the vibes#I am just trying to somehow capture the specific feeling of this wip#I am gripping you by the shoulders#Lya brainrot oof I am crushing her in my fist like a ball of aluminum foil
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