MERCURIAL ( paul atreides.. )

020. By Virtue of Silence, We Pray..

( THIS CHAPTER CONTAINS NSFW CONTENT. )
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Intimacy.

Mercury leant back into her chair. Her perception of reality has heightened. Colors got brighter. Yet she was hardly able to reach the level of comprehension necessary to grasp why her ravenous desires had suddenly driven her past the levels of decency she's been taught since birth. She let go completely, enslaved to her heart's desires, to the fires of her soul, to the divine energy which nestled deep inside her body and roared as powerful as a thunder in the height of the strongest storm. Time had proven itself to be quite the tempest of darkness for her since the days she would rather compare herself to a mollusc chasing calls and finding shells between planets than see there was antiquity in her fingertips; between ragged breaths, she had decided that there was no need to define what just happened, but rather take it as it was, as a call that she answered. 

She had died that day.

Smiling, she started hoping her mind would not forget that any time soon.

As abhorrent as it would seem to others, her tangency with death had not been an odious thing, regardless of the spikes of ice it left into her throat. Now that the cold uneasiness had been relieved by her moment without definition, Mercury settled herself on an exhale. There was no shame left in her mind from the puddle in which she drowned pitifully a moment ago. Tears had dried on her cheeks, but the heat had also evaporated guilt for her and the silence reassured with a blanket as certain as any belief. 

Drawn away, her hands trembled, fingers shivered with a deafened ache, and thankfully, her arms had no momentary task other than to rest. She allowed them to hang towards the ground and answer to gravity rather than to the remnants of twitches travelling her dispersed body, gathering its atoms back together alone. One controlled breath at a time. 

She had died and she had returned from the dead.

That was enough to twist anyone's mind out of order, but all Mercury acknowledged it had done to her was confirm what she's already been embedded with since she was but a child, undeserving of the horrors that came with Susurros and Ehya's gift of vigilance over history itself. Those sectarian paradigms carved with a knife on the inside of her skull to guard her mind into watchfulness and virtue. They had forged her into a believer to the great beyond. Now, more than ever, she was reassured that, looking up, something, somewhere, must have stared down on her too. 

A younger variant of herself, the one not crucified in martyred exhaustion worthy of a Renaissance's rebirth in every corner of the Known Universe, would have called it Yich Kuxtal. The holder of her heart would however call it Time, insisting, most likely, to add its title of 'friend'. Her smile caught color. Though she no longer had a name for it, clarity had compelled her to imagine its true nature laid somewhere in between those appellatives, a single nudge beyond their semantic foundation.

Lucidity turned to precision of wonder and unlike the images transposed by her physical eyes, now blurring between two blinks she was unable to take consecutively, her mind's sight opened to a fundamental truth, an axiom: her and Paul were each a numen, but there was divinity beyond that golden eminence still, something intangible and formless lurked and stood by their side.

"Thank you," Mercury whispered into darkness. 

There was no expectancy of an answer, though there was much she thought she should be beholden to. Amongst those shimmering stars, the fact that she was guided away from her bed, shared in blissful flesh of dreams with Paul, and into seclusion for this moment of relief was her very own moon of silver worth every and each howl of praise.