My Manic and I

Based upon the song "My Manic and I" by Laura Marling, currently item 34 on my "Eradicate" playlist, the songlist for my novel. These characters are directly taken from the story.

Felix thinks, oh how he thinks, that the world hates him, with all the passion of predator upon prey, enemy against enemy, in an endless battlefield from which the blood and broken bones are quicksand to his feet. He finds himself unable to escape, his every struggle pulling him deeper into madness.

And in the murk is Katerin, her bright blue eyes emerging from the corpses around her prone form, her too-wide grin baring every one of her crooked teeth, crooked teeth like markings in a graveyard, oh how Felix yearns for the battlefield to swallow him whole so he can escape the creature waiting for him.

Katerin wants to die there - not right now, not a decade into the future, not a century - but one day, when her madness has corroded her mind, Felix knows he will lead her to a war like the one in his head, let her disappear amongst the chaos and the mayhem, and he'll never see her again, because the bodies will cover her own, until she's nothing more then an unidentified, unclaimed corpse in a morgue.

Katerin wants to die in battle, her life claimed by blood, going out screaming and with complications, the same way she came into this world. Perhaps, he thinks, it isn't even revenge or bloodlust that would drive her, but simply the tradition to be so like her family before her. Die and pass it along, let your children hold the knife that carries you to the all-mother, let them take your crown, your money and your land, let them hold your courts while you rot with their knives in your hearts. Felix knows she shall pretend to the day she dies, pretend even as breath begins to rattle in her lungs, that she has children to pass along her ruined blood, to continue to taint the earth.

Whoever came up with the idea of hereditary villains was a sick man. A false god, an unworthy face to worship, yet Katerin whispers his name at night, stiff fingers glasping her bejewelled Moon pendent, chanting lines of old script because she wants to believe that she was cursed for a reason. Katerin believes in her Gods because there is nobody else who can listen without shaking.

Katerin wants to die forgotten, but Felix knows she won't. He knows a morgue slab is the only thing keeping the rest of the world from knowing, knowing that monsters crawled from the ice of the south one morning so many years ago, that monsters stalked the shadows and feasted from the weak, tormented and scarred, killed and stole and ensnared above all else, the hearts of foolish mortals that dared to love such darkness.

Katerin greets his with kisses in the mornings, in the evenings. She tastes foul, has in all honesty never known beauty. Her nails dig into his wrists when she holds him but what can he say, for he is weak and she is strong.

She greets in kindness, soft and quiet, on the days the world has deceived her in turn, told her Katerin has done well for the Greater Good. (Gods, mother and Eethen, thinks Felix, all Katerin touches turns to evil, how can he possible think she even knows the word good? Perhaps her false Gods told her.)

Some days she kisses with scorn and sometimes Felix chooses to believe her anyway because he doesn't want to think-

He's falling, falling for her, falling into the black, into the murk. His mind overtakes him, he cries in his sleep, while Katerin lies awake, watching the night pass by, knowing the mind's closure won't come.

He'll wake and he'll take her from the demons that surrond her, hide the bottles she drains and hold her because Katerin is broken. She will weep and he will not and then they'll switch but they can't help because while Katerin's mind is cracked, her soul shattered, Felix's is gone.

His manic is still going, growing darker every day but he just stays still, thinking she's crazy but never doing anything because she's Katerin.

And he loves her.

Felix is hollow, alone and mangled. He's twisted and disfigured inside, while outside he still holds a gentle face, with a charming smile, and the people in the street give him looks of longing, but alas, he can not go, for Katerin can not provide, be it money or love, but he wants her all the same.

The morning would mock, he'd cry in his sleep and his manic would smile against his collarbone at his nightmares, tasting his terror and loving it. His monster with blue eyes and that too-wide grin, ugly face split in delight and hunger.

He thinks they are ill, sick in the mind, a disease on the face of their world and their kind. Katerin is cursed, the last of her line, doomed to failure even though she tries. And Felix loves, though he should really hate, but he can't in the end.

Because its already too late.