forever cold.
But Terrible is right. His job has always been doing what is unpalatable and unpopular. He is doing that job even though he risks my wrath by doing it.
I do what has to be done, because that is what kings do. Sometimes I take as I will. Other times, I must sacrifice.
So I let her go.
I watch her walk away, feeling as though I am taking the greatest loss I have ever experienced in any battle, and it is happening without a fight.
* * *
Tania
The last walk down the hall toward the bright light which will deposit me back home. This time there is no magical balloon ride. There is a teleportation of some kind which is triggered as I walk. Just as I feel myself swept up into the light, I look over my shoulder, hoping to hear Tyrant call me back.
But he is gone.
The ship is gone.
The world is normal again.
I am standing on the roof of my apartment building; my senses suddenly assaulted by the smells and sounds of the city. It is so much louder than I ever realized. Cars swish by, engines whining and complaining, horns being sounded at random intervals across the city.
There’s no ship. I can’t even see the stars in the sky when I look up. There's nothing but a cloudy haze of light pollution which blocks out the glory of all existence outside our little world.
I walk back down into my building, my feet moving on autopilot as I negotiate my way down stairs which suddenly seem so primitive. I have been living in a realm of high technology.
“OW!”
I grab my nose. I’ve just tried to walk through the wall due to force of habit, and it has ended painfully.
“Fucking hell,” I curse to myself, glad for an excuse to give voice to the misery and anger which has been welling in me over the last sixty seconds of pure abandonment. There’s some part of me that thinks he might change his mind and come back for me, perhaps with a grand gesture of romance.
But it doesn’t happen, and I am eventually forced to lower myself to the mechanical action of opening a door again like some kind of primate poking at its food with a stick. I never knew that just being human could feel like a humiliation in and of itself. No wonder Tyrant rid himself of me. I am such a ridiculous flesh creature constrained by things like solid matter.
My apartment isn’t locked. I left it in a hurry, not that anybody noticed. I wonder, for a brief moment, if I have been robbed in my absence.
“Oh my god, I have been robbed!” I gasp as I step into the small space which once felt like my own private domain. My possessions are strewn everywhere with no regard for logic or order. There’s so much stuff, laying about on top of other items, thrown carelessly by someone who had no regard for it.
It takes me far too long to realize that nothing is missing. Because I haven’t been robbed. This is just how I live.
Standing in the middle of a room whose walls I can touch with arms outstretched if I just lean a little one way, then the other, I feel an absolute disgust with myself.
Was my apartment really always this humiliatingly small? Was it always this messy? Did it always have this smell? It has been closed up for two weeks, though having the door partly ajar probably let some of the stench out.
I check my emails, which helps me orient myself to the present. According to my unread spam messages, I’ve been gone for two weeks to the day. That’s hardly any time at all. It’s not even a decent summer break.
I sit down on the couch, feeling every unpleasant part of it. The way the hard frame is pushing through the padding. The scratchiness of the parts where someone’s cat has used it as a scratching post. I find myself sensitive to everything, noticing everything. I hate it.
I've been changed, probably forever, by what I saw and experienced. I can’t go back to pretending that everything is fine here on Earth when I now know everything isn’t only not fine, it’s completely backwards. I’ve been living in the gutter all my life, and someone took me out among the stars — then dropped me right back into the gutter. I have reason to be bitter.
But I also have to face facts.
This is my