1106. About woe, 6
(Armylè)
This apogee of our lives together would unfortunately meet an end later this year.
But we had no warning sign.
My big girls entered high school in a good Lyceum.
They would be allowed to change their orientation over the upcoming years, but I was surprised of their first choices to start. Prume went on the scientific and engineering side; while Elyne went on the cultural and literature side. I had expected the opposite. But Prume had a taste for understanding scientific discoveries, and had accumulated too much lassitude with novels and history. Elyne to still attempt to make sense out of our relative construction of reality. She still was slightly obsessed with metaphysics and philosophical understanding that came after the scientific proofs.
So they might change their choices over the years, but I left them to make their mistakes sometimes. I knew neither of them would follow my artistic focused footsteps and I was even a little proud of that somehow.
Maybe there was something colder than usual in the air. Some foreboding elements could have warned us.
Did they notice the ambassadors more than usual? The six white snakes might have grown slightly more active lately.
Something invisible was shivering, a wider layer structuring our reality was oscillating a little more harshly.
I wouldn’t know how to structure our life story around that moment.
A few more peaceful months. Their next birthday was just as happy as should be. Fourteen years old and doing quite fine. I felt as if the last years had gone faster than before. The relativity of perceived time was bittersweet.
Néphéline had celebrated her ninth birthday with Prume, in a more intimate setting at her house. She didn’t have the same family nor tastes as Prume. A small cake and time with her best friend just for her were all she needed to be fulfilled, and Prume happily obliged. She really liked that young girl.
Meanwhile for the twins birthday, it was a little more festive. I invited a lot of people, both children and parents. Néphéline was less at ease in such situations, but endured for Prume. She was cute.
Everyone was smiling naturally and it was a good time. We all were confident for the future.
A few more months, and we reached winter. The new year passed, and it happened like a sudden sky fall on a cold morning of January.
~
The weather was clearly cold outside. Elyne had more painful periods that morning. I encouraged her to go anyway. Prume was not concerned. They wore winter clothing and went walking outside, on their way to school. Elyne held her tummy a little more, uneasy. She was feeling weird and walking faster. Prume followed. She hadn’t said much this morning, but I didn’t make much of it.
Rather suddenly, Prume stopped walking, her mouth slightly open. As if she was just realising she had forgotten something home. She didn’t say a word. She just stopped walking, her gaze lost in the distance.
Elyne stopped as well but felt the unease growing fast in her. She felt a momentum of panic rushing inside of her. She had turned toward her, and met only a sensation of disarray.
They exchanged looks of utter sorrow for a quiet eternity. Beneath their feet, the world was crumbling.
The cold air that Prume felt was no longer outside of her, but growing wild from within. She had felt as if her entire flesh inside had been replaced by nothingness, a hole in reality infinitely deep and suddenly pulling all of her flesh inside. A void had settled inside and suddenly grown to swallow all of her. She was about to collapse, leaving no molecule intact behind. Maybe only her hollow clothes would remain, but nothing of her being she felt.
Elyne gazed with horror as she understood what Prume felt. That sensation of utter inner collapse, of disappearing, of dying, suddenly. Only a thin film of colours still held her shape together figuratively, and they felt she would simply vanish, leaving nothing.
Prume looked at something in the air, as her last controlled movement. She felt herself fall, not seeing anything anymore. Fog was growing and overwhelming all her senses now. All was drowning in that mute and cloudy sensation. She felt the cold air over her face as a last fading sensation.
Elyne by sympathy felt the same tragedy, but managed to move her all too heavy body in time to catch her fall. She held Prume and tried to bring her back for a moment, calling for her.
Prume couldn’t hear. All she felt was the dissolution in a colourless ocean that knew no light. She was disappearing suddenly in the depths of a sea of chaos, a starless space, where her body didn’t exist and her mind would dissolve. She felt that dissolution. Prume shed a few tears without blinking, just collapsing. Her lips might have shivered but no more words were escaping. Her muscles were all failing, as her nervous system was collapsing. She didn’t feel anything any longer.
Elyne couldn’t stand witnessing what was akin to dying. She felt like her own sense of self would be following. She yelled, calling her sister to fight, to wake up, to return. All hopelessly.
Elyne called her over and over, louder, without getting any reply nor reaction.
No one in the street at the time was close enough to witness the moment and help. Elyne felt for too many seconds as lost as if she had been all alone in the world. Prume seemed in contact with something entirely different from our reality, her eyes focusing on something all too distant and invisible, her body limp.
Elyne shook her more and more violently, without achieving anything.
Prume’s eyes were wide open as if she was looking at something in the sky, but really she wasn’t there anymore. There was nothing to see. She didn’t hear her sister anymore. She wouldn’t have been able to reply. Losing all her senses before consciousness, she probably suffered a moment of pure terror. She had shed a few tears, but hard to say if they were her last emotional reaction or something more simply breaking down as she was gone...
Elyne wanted to believe it was a sign she still was there, at least a little...
Elyne held onto the body completely limp between her arms. She was tearing up herself, feeling the dissolution of her sister she couldn’t seem to prevent. She was making a face from pain and horror.
She yelled again, calling her name, telling her she always had been the strongest of the two...
Prume’s head just tilted where the weight pulled her. Elyne was broken seeing her nearly dead.
She saw a reflection in her eyes, or an illusion. As if a last glint from Prume had been a message.
Looking up in the same direction, Elyne saw the white snakes floating there, quiet and without shadows.
They were harder to notice on a snowy day, but obviously just there to her. They just were there, as usual.
Elyne yelled at them with loud anger, as they were apparently watching Prume die without doing a thing.
E - Save her!
Now she was beginning to cry, holding onto Prume nearly lying down on the pavement.
E - Save her or I will destroy you! Save her!
Elyne was in blind anger, hopeless, against death and loss more than these weird things still floating hollow and abnormal.
The snow was turning into light rain slowly, that would turn the frost on the ground into watery muds.
One man that had heard her finally arrived close enough to witness and help.
He helped Elyne who was losing control behind her tears. He called for an ambulance, and carried Prume under the cover of the closest building’s entrance. He checked Prume’s heartbeat and found none. He checked her breathing and found none. He sighed.
- She’s... dead.
Elyne’s tears stopped. Her eyes opened wide. Her heart had a jolt of fury. She yelled a terrifying wrath for what she couldn’t handle, spooking the man and the other people getting closer.
The man tried to tell her something but Elyne was gone too somewhere else. She had grabbed his collar and thrown the strongest punch she could make, knocking him out and exploding his jaw to bits in the surrounding way. The other people around saw the blood and what could have looked like a murder from the wrong perspective. They panicked and ran away.
Elyne recovered her consciousness right away, half a second too late, as the man was dropping just as limp on the ground. He was bleeding and his head looked disfigured. She was shocked, but still more focused on Prume apparently dead just beside. Her eyes had no longer blinked, her mouth like everything else remained limp now.
She was dead...
Elyne still called out to her, in denial or burning the last slither of hope.
E - Wake up... I won’t let you die like that!
In violent despair, Elyne lifted her, holding her against the wall with one hand, and punched her in the tummy with the other. Prume didn’t cough, didn’t spit, and didn’t react to that.
E - Wake up! Come out! Come out!
Elyne threw three more punches onto her, breaking a few ribs, trying to jolt back anything. She couldn’t go stronger without really hurting the body further, yet it did nothing.
She gave up, and pulled her back to hold her, tearing up. She begged her again to return and more.
And then... She saw the snakes again. They were a little more agitated now perhaps, as her body was decaying and beginning to die. They seemed more active, and maybe beginning to shine?
E - Save her if you value your life! You freakin’ snakes! If she doesn’t come back I’ll kill you all!
The ambassadors perhaps heard some of her intent.
Perhaps now that something was collapsing inside Prume’s biology, they were able to do more.
They got closer. Elyne was clinging in tears to the dying body, strongly enough to choke her if she still had been able to breathe.
She knew these things wouldn’t just obey her, but she had nothing else to cling onto for hope now.
But by miracle or coincidence, something happened.
The emissaries that had observed Prume and Elyne for so long, now did something else. They dove inside Prume’s right shoulder blade, as if to bite her skin or get their head stuck there, piercing through the clothings. Elyne noticed and then saw how the three anchored things flapped around like weird tentacles. She was rightfully confused.
E - Wha... What are you doing to her!
She tried to grab one, and she caught it. Her hand and fingers didn’t go through the holographic shape. She felt it and almost let go of it in surprise. She had a hiccup of surprise.
They were not dreams? They were real?
Elyne squeezed the soft and lukewarm flesh harder, as if to crush it. It didn’t explode, but it deformed under her strength. She couldn’t rip it out just like that.
However Prume suddenly moaned, as if she had returned and felt the pain herself. Elyne had another strong twitch of surprise hearing it. Elyne lifted her head immediately to call her name again and again. Loud enough to wake up the undead.
The three emissaries previously flapping around randomly now aligned their movements, and more slowly began to undulate. They looked like the skeletal frame of a wing to Elyne for a moment.
Prume had a hiccup, opened her mouth, her stare still blank.
In an abrupt jolt, Prume’s body arched and she began vomiting a rather dark fluid, darker than blood, spilling it over the ground like ink. Elyne didn’t care much about that, and more about Prume being not so far.
E - Prume! I’m there!
Prume fell back nevertheless. The three emissaries that Elyne had seen and touched vanished as if they had never been there. But Prume twitched in her arms, and albeit unconscious now was seen exhaling air by Elyne. Prume’s eyes had shut on their own as well.
She was alive... She was breathing again...
E - Prume... Are you okay?
The ambulance arrived around then.
The medics took the two girls and the man with crushed jaw. They examined everyone and focused on the two unconscious people, soon carrying them away. Elyne had jumped inside with her sister.
For once she threw an apologetic look toward the man whose tongue was seen hanging from the open throat, since everything above had been ripped away. She felt the guilt again.
E - Are they... going to be okay?
- Your little sister should be fine. As for your father, I don’t know who or what did that, but it will take work.
E - ... How much work?
The medic surmised a prosthetic would be required, and some time to regrow the ripped muscles, nerves and skin. It would be long and painful. Beside her guilt, Elyne was relieved to hear that Prume should be fine...
E - I’m sorry... He’s not my father but, it doesn’t matter... I hit him. I didn’t mean to...
They didn’t believe her, doubting she could have done such harm without a weapon at hand. They told her to shut it and remain sit while they drove to the hospital.
Elyne observed how the medic was placing emergency medical materials on the wounded man, while the other was checking Prume’s electroencephalogram. Some screen showed some waves and coloured numbers that reminded Elyne of sadder times.
- Well, looks like she asleep and dreaming. Weird she didn’t wake up. Is she narcoleptic?
E - No but... She’s going to be okay?
- Yes, I think she’s okay.
Elyne began crying more loudly, more tearful than before.
Now she couldn’t hold it in anymore. She couldn’t answer and let herself go in turn.
~
