Page 252 of Venom Sweeter than Honey
When the door shuts behind them, the silence between me and... me is painfully loud.
“I’m going to hazard a guess that you have no designs to return my energy body back to where it belongs?”
Even to me the words feel wrong, and unease trickles in as if somehow, someway, that, if anything, I’m the doppelganger.
He stares blankly at me. “You know that I know that you know the reality of the situation.”
It wouldn’t work even if we tried.
Just like the entropy of Ourinessa.
As if struggling against some unseen noose cinching tight around my throat, I finally speak the words that have been darkening every corner of my mind since I awakened as nothing more than a head cradled in Violette’s hands.
“This is the consequence of lamenting my existence, and atonement for my sins.”
He doesn’t need to respond.
Words that have haunted me since the destruction of Vassileo, my Hell realm, echo in my mind.“Only in death will you find freedom, Azrael.”Spoken by a soothsayer, Miroslav, whose origins even I am unable to fully discern.
It takes effort to force the memory away.
“Did you visit Ourinessa?”
“Just before I came here.”
“And... ?”
He gives me a look that says I already know the answer.
As long as I wish for death, Ourinessa will continue to deteriorate, and its souls will bleed back into the aether.
I already witnessed it with Vassileo. Though it was destroyed with far more violence... and instead of its souls returning to Akash,they were sucked into other realms.
I remain silent.
The sigh he expels isn’t one of judgment; it’s of sorrow.
“I’m sorry I can’t heal you, for you.”
Me too.
“Do you truly feel... healed? Like the cumulative weight of eons past is no longer crushing you?”
My twin props an elbow on the edge of the tub as he scrubs a hand over his mouth, and his gaze grows distant. Thoughtful.
“Healedwould suggest a completion of the process, but heal-ing,yes. As for the weight of eons, when Levi tried to kill us... I did in fact experience a kind of death. However fleeting. When I spilled out of our body and was just a mass of shadowy life essence, I forgot everything. There was no me. I just...was.When I acted, it was on your behalf because I was guided by your desire, and whatever connectivity we still had in spirit. But when it waned, and I disappeared... I was in the aether.”
What in the sacred fuck?
I lean forward, eyes narrowed in disbelief. “The actual womb of Akash?”
He nods, eyes falling on some distant point as if his mind is travelling back there now. “Yes.”
I sit back, features gradually slackening as this registers in my mind.
“How did you make it back? And if you had no memory,why?”
The corners of his mouth slowly lift in a smile. “My soul was called back to hers.”
