One.

Don’t speak words you don’t mean, because you’re trying to sell me thoughts you think I want to hear, she says.

Or at least she thinks she says but she can’t fill her lungs to say.

Strength? Was never her issue. Her voice? It’s no longer there.

And now the air she breaths finds no way back; retreating into the coils of her vertebrae.

She’s the one. With twisted heart and braided veins. She’s always the one, who helps them through the last one.

And there’s always a last one. That last one. With the intoxicating vibe. That inauthentic truth. Who stares into the nothingness, and whispers.

Bitter. Sweet. Nothing.

That cantilever off a cliff. Tethered by a flawed sense of faith, of liberation, of passion, of that which they cannot have.

That last one.

Throws them into the depths and back, gravity unrelenting. Back to where? Back to that sick, sweet, rotting mulch of the human heart. Back to bleakness. To the derelict…rift?

And now she’s back.

At that awkward intersection where struggle meets synergy, between realities and ideas. Of Adaptation, not ego.

Distress masked as intrigue veiled as infatuation. And he’s the veiled one.

With this smoke in her eyes, perhaps she should be too.

Because that last one takes everything.

And didn’t she know…she’s just the Architect of his ego?