A sharp hiss and then she struck, pain erupting, consuming, overwhelming.
As I sank to the floor, I felt distant, removed. Shock. My mind dazedly fixed on the feeling of blood oozing from wounds, hands grasping at floorboards.
I was dying.
I could feel it as surely as I'd ever felt anything. It came all at once, yet it had been there all along. It was unchanging and unrelenting.
I was dying.
Then came the wave of guilt and regret. I'd not told the boy. I'd failed, again. Then it, like everything else began to slip. I felt myself begin to drift, foreign coldness enfolding my limbs, everything was fading.
Then, suddenly, I saw her eyes as I'd always yearned to. They were all I could see. They consumed me and blocked out the pain and the cold. I was floating, but words slowly crept through the haze. Calling me what she'd never called me. Slamming home my painful reality. Of course it wouldn't, it couldn't, be her. It was the boy.
I couldn't have stopped the tears if I had tried. They welled up against my will seeping out as I executed my final act of betrayal and servitude. Sentencing her boy to death, to be slaughtered.
As I rasped instructions at him she began to leak out as well. I could feel the bits of her slip away and mix with that horrid truth. I tried to hang on, but they kept flowing. Piece by piece our time together slid unceremoniously down my face. All that I had of her, gone.
When the boy turned back, all I had of her was her green eyes. The rest of her was muted, subdued like the body I was rapidly leaving. He looked away and I panicked, grabbing for him.
"Look at me."
I was grasping, desperate, and then I was lost again in a sea of green. Words slipped out between numb lips as I felt the last of my strength go into maintaining that final gaze just another moment longer. If I could look her in the eye, she could see me. She could forgive me. She wouldn't leave me.
Strength waning, my thoughts scattered, muscles relaxed. My eyes lost focus, and everything was her green eyes.