You don't know if the others breathe like you do or if it's common enough that you're all bleeding in the skull and you're the weakest link, because you can't handle it. You don't know if your friends are popping pills behind your back, if your layers of lies and layers of sickness have kept you from knowing about others. But attachment is dangerous, and you know that.
The plague spreads like long fingers broken over wood blocks and hooks into your skull's fragmented remains because of the bent bone and the damaged flesh, with a dead god in your ears and telling you how you're going to work today – the way your back will arch and the tone of your voice, if you'll feel comfortable in your skin or if you'll want to tear it until the blood is mixing with viscera and you can't feel anything but a wind over flayed flesh. Castor breathes terrible melodies into your ear and the hand over your mouth can cover your eyes too, and you breathe nothing but ash.
They talk about, when the trigger is pulled, your brain becomes ice and you feel it melt in fire, but when you do it you feel your skull fracturing and the miasma spreading, and the crushing weight of a galaxy swelling inside you. You feel like a parasite pulled from you before submerging itself back into you again, wounds sewn tighter than they were before. Nothing is liberating about the symbolism. You gave up on the relief it brought before. You feel Castor's claw on your throat, his body rising, and then crashing back into you, something that can't be cut free, something that burrowed too deep beneath the skin.
He finds his way into your thoughts and crushes hope and your romanticized future in talons made of blackened diamond, the pull of gravity and sink drains swirling in the dust. Windstorms, made of broken glass and tap water. There's something disgusting in you and nobody wants to hear it, but you want to give them the scalpel so they can cut the infection out from your skin and so you can breathe through the laceration. Blood bubbles beneath the surface like oxygen in your veins. You take someone else's evoker and put it to your temple, because you heard - you heard, that taking the wrong evoker can kill you, can leave you dead in the brain and that means Castor will finally be dead, ashes spread to the sky's sea and becoming new stars, burning half of the Gemini cluster away and giving your second half the better future.
Fake gods talk to your in your head and you don't know what they say, speaking in languages like static and the sharp cut like an alarm. You wonder what they say. All you hear is a low whisper in a language you don't know, telling you that you're stuck with it.