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Illustrations by Jason Farmer

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Water Nymph / Switezianka by Lucas Staniec

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— midsummer | d.x.y

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Anne Carson, from Red Doc>

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Yennefer of Vengerberg + head-turning beauty trope

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O

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Voldemort, is my past, present and future.

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Ksenia Svincova

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Blood Ritual by Einar Martinsen

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I am that very witch. When I sleep my spirit slips away from my body and dances naked with The Devil.

The VVitch: A New-England Folktale (2015) dir. Robert Eggers

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Tom and Hermione as Hades and Persephone.

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MARK Z. DANIELEWSKI

House of Leaves (2000);

photos by G. Ngayu, or @monstertalent

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merger

The last four months echoed around Mirin as though she were standing still. Each day Eilithe passed by Mirin’s view blissfully unaware. Of her betrayal. Of Zelphryin’s.  He had asked to much. 

After they had returned from the Mirage-- no, not the Mirage, some..version of it, Mirin had gone straight to Eilithe the next morning. Ten years she had spent seeking an answer, and she had found far much more. 

“I found it,” Mirin said, her voice tense in her throat.   Eilithe quirked a brow, “After all this time? How?” “It doesn’t matter.”  “Where?” 

Mirin looked away and pointed to the corner of her eye, “Between blinks. In the corner of the eye. A hidden city in the sands.” Eilithe’s silence did not prompt Mirin to continue. 

“When’s the last time you slept, Mirin?”  “I am alright, Lady An’Diel.”  Eilithe snorted, “Anything else?” 

Severin is still alive. Severin is still alive and I aided in bringing him back here. “No, my lady, that is all.” 

Sleep was unkind her for weeks after. Appointments, missed. Self-isolating as though she meant to starve out sickness in her heart and mind. The first guest to arrive at her apartment in weeks.

Doctor Lorien Carcimor, whom she’d invited to dinner with the intentions of understanding him better. 

Five months ago, a man appeared in the Lamb and was given a glass of cold milk in a fluted glass. How peculiar she’d thought, though it wasn’t as strange as his aura. Encased in arcane. He was hiding something. 

Admittedly she had kept her distance from the Lorien until so-urged by Zelphryin to get close to the Doctor. Perhaps she was drawn in for other reasons-- he was handsome, polite. Moreover, he was respectful. Kind. 

"Tension in your neck, hm?" Mirin asked, "You ought visit the bathhouse in town. A warm bath and a massage would no doubt soothe you."

"If I'm frank, I'm not quite the fan of massages from strangers. I've trust issues, as one could presume, and having someone so close to my neck that I do not know or trust enough to touch my flesh is not an opportunity I'll seize too quickly,” Lorien said absently as he began to prepare dinner. "Once more, I risk being rude-- but.. people with trust issues tend to find themselves flocking to one place. Not strange that you've found yourself here in Dead Sun. As for..touch, that does surprise me. Though I suppose it is one way or the other, isn't it? Either men like you seek the touch of strangers with wanton abandon, or you reserve it as a treat to be offered only to the worthy. I shall remember this the next time I require your arm in a pinch. Though if I recall you did say you'd indulge me again." 

"Men like me?" He asked, pausing in his actions, "There are no men like me. Unfortunately your two deductions are wrong." 

A handful of people over the course of several hundred years had been so bold as to tell her she was wrong. She had proposed to him that the evening would end in three ways. 

"I'd be curious if you'd indulge or make me aware of these three outcomes that plague your mind, that way the ending of these evening, which is entirely in my hands-" He corrected subtly, his tongue pressing coyly for a second to the inside of his cheek, "Can be decided properly and with examination of all potentialities. I wouldn't want to make an uninformed decision, after all."

"It is a pastime of mine. Every choice has an infinite number of outcomes, I entertain myself with narrowing it down, often to only three. It is not a burden, but again-- who am I to refuse your request? You are, after all, a guest in my home." Mirin sat back and crossed her legs, though the posture of her upper body remained open. "The first and least complex, of course, is that you decide you have had your fill this evening. That you have imbibed enough, held hands in the light long enough and you respectfully retire." Mirin's eyes moved across the hallway, towards the door-- almost like she were trying something. "We say a polite goodbye at the door, lingering a bit longer that necessary." "Secondly, I take you on a tour of this suite. It is no grand journey, but there are lots of things to learn and look at. You walk with your hands at your back, gripping your wrist--looking at the collection in my study and continuing this banter. And when that draws to a close and you depart as you did in the first option." Mirin again, looked like she was tracking movement from the door now to the back hall.  "In the third option that I see, you decide to stay for a spell longer." She said, and purposefully didn't go into any detail. Her eyes soon found his.

Two astronomical bodies drawn in at increasing speeds until their shrinks and the merger begins.

"Knowing me will take you a lifetime. I'm not just a single puzzle to solve and set down- I am a series of several interlocking and consistently evolving enigmas that shift, change, and meld together. To solve one you must solve the other, but by then the solution may have changed. You'll be settling in for a difficult ride.”

“I'm a jealous man, Mirin, and I don't share. That may be a hard ask for you."

It was-- her appointment book was filled with the names of men she entertained. For their conversation. For their looks. Giving up them, ultimately proved nothing. The trouble was the man that was not the men written there. The trouble was the man who lived in a dark corner in her heart with a tight grip.

When Mirin thought of that evening, that evening that she gave up everything for what she thought was more a pair sentences had the scales. Had pushed Mirin to give in to Lorien. 

"Do you know the lifecycle of a binary black hole, Lorien?"

“Intimately.” 

That night sealed those next four months. When the gravitational waves would come crashing down around her, slowing her down and down, until time moved around her. 

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10k Gold Foiled Amethyst Conversion Ring