Hur falters

Hur felt a tightening in his stomach. He clenched, breathed in deeply. This feeling, he thought he had gotten rid of it. After the rajah destroyed her, no, he didn’t want to think about that. He had suffered terribly. He had suffered terribly, he had found some purpose and direction that he felt that he had been lacking. It wasn’t that either. He had thought that by drowning himself in the task at hand, he could somehow forget her. Hur felt a heaviness in his head, almost as if the weight of the things inside were threatening to break the earth, to push the rest of him far inside, into the depths. Where there was naught but molten, burning, erratic lava. He felt his insides churn, not at the thought of the lava, but the ill begotten thoughts of her. He had passed a mansion, an abandoned one a while ago, and it had brought him back to where he had met here, and how he had felt when they were united for the first time. They had not been apart since. And then, in one fell swoop, she had been removed from him. And he had mourned, terribly so. But he had tried to drown himself in duty, and duty had prevailed. Duty had taken over his life, enforced upon it by the vast series of coincidences, and responsibilities that it entailed. And now, she was back in his head, dancing a sonata that he had once felt was meant for him, and based on how much it hurt, he still thought it was. She was dancing by the moonlight, beautiful as ever. Not alien, no more excitingly exotic, new, strange. Now she was the warmth of familiarity, the fire of hearth. She danced by the moonlight in the forest of his head, and it was now lush with longing and pain. Coupled with the fact that duty had grown obsessively psychotic as of late. The fact that he thought this was all a- not her, no, never her- creation of his head. A fantasy concocted by a sick brain. He knew he was sick. He knew he was ill. Maybe this was all in his head, burning up the passages, a fever riddled brain. Nothing remaining. Maybe this was all in his head, and he did not know how to react. Maybe that was why he thought his task, as surreal as it was, as he had believed so deeply in it before, was just a manifestation of a diseased brain. Hur felt a tightening in his stomach, his fingertips felt the ghost of her touch, his eyes saw nothing but her smile, beautiful and wide, spreading in front of her, her hair as it flipped around, the animation in her eyes as she spoke. The fire, the passion, the warmth. Duty was psychotic, crazy. He would kill himself soon.

Far away, the shadow rajah searched in vain. Where was this boy? He must find him. He must. Severing the bond, slitting the girl’s throat, it had not helped. The board was still evenly stacked.