☾° Compelled. ⌜ d. swing. ⌟

☾° › thirteen.

DeVanté DeGrate.

I was never the type to run away from my issues or even a hard conversation, but Zena pressing me about a life that I no longer lived was enough to solicit a disappearing act. I wasn't ready to divulge the information of my former self to her; nor the architect of  this whole situation. Trying to explain Nyx to her would be equivalent to trying to explain God to a non-believer. She was a god to me, she created me in her own image. And even more literally, Zena. I left her apartment in a hurry, gave her some excuse about needing to make sure my brother wasn't being an improper influence on our newly transformed friends, but she saw right through that. It was a damn shame that I couldn't compel her to believe whatever I wanted her to.

Once home, I rushed past the party that was going on in my living room, ignoring the invitation to join and the insults hurled my way when I declined. Freewill was a motherfucka, and I was starting to regret giving it out.

There was only one person I needed to talk to, and she for damn sure wasn't in my home. Instead, she was buried in my mental, somewhere beyond the scope of reality. She'd showed me that existence knew no bounds, especially since she only dwelled in the crevice of my memory. It took me a while, centuries, to learn how to conjure her. Most of the time she called out to me, not the other way around, but tonight I was initiating the conversation.

Sleep was optional. I loved the way it felt, it seemed to anchor me back to my humanity. I didn't need it, but I cherished it. Tonight it was a necessity, Nyx was poetic, and she would always end all of our encounters with 'see you in your dreams', so despite her omnipresent spirit, the astral realm was the only place we could truly connect.

The scene around me was familiar, dust, dirt, the fullness of a beaming sun but the stillness was always so eerie and off putting, it was the one thing that kept me grounded in the real world. The plane mirrored a biome that was once home for both of us, as a way of making our short times together more impactful, or even more comfortable. Usually she would show up moments after I did, but today was much different. I was standing amongst the pyramids completely alone. "NYX!" I yelled. My mood clearly not cut out for her games. As quickly as I blinked, the beautiful siren materialized, she was always so vivid; even though I knew I couldn't physically touch her, the desire was there. However, her sudden appearance startled me, prompting me to damn near jump out of my skin.

"Got damn, Nyx. Let a nigga know when you about to just pop up, shit." I rushed to request, perplexity situated on the ancient beauty's face as she attempted to decipher the context of my sentence riddled with modern slang. I could visibly see the moment I'd lost her.

"A ni-..." She started and I immediately interjected.

"It means like a man, a person." As funny as it would've been to hear the newly embraced word leave her lips in the ancient Egyptian dialect, she would've transformed it back into its original slur with as much vitriol she possessed.

"You left out a very important part, Nyx..."  I spoke, sternness in my tone causing a wicked grin to grace the lower half of her visage. Her eyes sparkled as she couldn't help but to be enamored with my newfound assertiveness. "Oh? What's that my love?" She responded, cocking her eyebrow as if she had no clue what I was referring to, when she knew good and damn well. "She's a witch? I feel like that would've been instrumental to know, going into this. You made her seem like some mere mortal, a damsel in distress and all the time she had the tools to control me?"

She laughed. That fucking laugh. It was a humbling mixture of amusement and pity.

"Ah, ah, ah...you made the mistake of thinking she was a damsel. Do you think I would ever send a weakling to you with my face? So you can exact revenge on her and fantasize that it's me?" She retorted and I froze in place. Revenge? Did she think I was angry at her for turning me? Or did she know that I had finally realized the imbalance of power between us so many moons ago.