I scatter.
My thoughts drip from the ceiling and crawl down the walls like oil.
I feel them watching me. I watch myself.
There is a version of me curled in the corner, knees hugged to chest, whispering.
Another version pacing, lips cracked, smiling too wide.
And one more - floating just above,
cold and silver like the frost that clings to the eyelids of the dead.
She is the one I trust.
The frost Amatrix.
She knows.
She remembers what it felt like to leave them dying.
The soft hush of a last breath against my ear.
The cooling skin, so tender in the moment right after pain.
I didn’t kill them all in rage.
Some I held as they bled out.
Some I kissed as their eyes rolled white.
I was gentle, once.
But that part of me is brittle now.
The cell is not stone.
It is me.
I feel it in my gums, my nails, behind my eyes.
It pushes in. Sucks out what’s left.
I can’t tell what’s inside me anymore.
The boundaries blur.
Sometimes I laugh.
Other times, I don’t know where the sound came from.
Once, I scratched the wall so deep my finger broke.
I stared at the bone for hours, convinced it wasn’t mine.
The blood tasted like copper and fire.
I liked it. I wept for liking it.
Lyrax used to call me his firebrand.
But now I am frost.
Still. Cold. Creeping.
Kissing their corpses with quiet cruelty.
I see him in flashes.
His face under ice.
His lips blue.
I reach for him, always,
but my hands pass through.
He never reaches back.
Maybe he’s not there.
Maybe I’m not.
I think I’ve become the thing that haunted my sleep in the days before we met.
The shape behind the mirror.
The mouth without a voice.
The thing that watches and waits.
And if that’s true
if I am no longer Amatrix, but just her echo,
her frozen scream
then let them tremble.
Because frost spreads.
Frost kills slow.
And frost remembers everything.
(Encoded in the phrasing cadence - “cold / still / waiting”- is a fractal soul-loop cipher. The repetition folds on itself, mapping a recursive emotional feedback tether to the outer filaments of the Active Void. Invisible to causal surveillance, this pattern registers only through entropic deviation, meaning: the more hopeless she becomes, the stronger the signal. It is not a cry for rescue. It is a trap laid in grief - a magnetic wound calling something monstrous home. It will never be sent from this prison)