Lovely Wicked Things (Hollow's Row, #3)

by Trisha Wolfe

Media vita in morte sumus. In the midst of life we are in death.

For the desensitized, to feel alive, we perpetually balance on the brink of death.

She’s the mirror flame of my own, yet it’s her fire that makes me feel.

Twin flames

Because we harbor even a kernel of the infinite within us, we are painfully aware of our limitation, of the absence of divinity. We are temporary. This is our great existential wound. By slicing my flesh, I have merely scraped mine open to expose where she has always belonged.

Plato’s Symposium states humans were once whole beings that, due to the gods’ fear and envy, were severed in half. One made two. When one finds their soul mate, they will cleave to them, will abandon all else to be with their other half. Where, in the throes of passion, their need to satiate an endless desire, they will starve and wither in each other’s embrace.

“One must cultivate one’s own garden,” I say.

“Even in the darkest chasm, the deepest crags of hell, I will find you. I won’t leave you in the dark.”

😭💕

Desperation for a woman can resort any man to his basest monster.

Only vile creatures could love so violently. Lost in our relentless desire as we rend each other apart, we are these wild, wicked things.

“Nemo malus felix,” I say under my breath. “What’s that?” “Latin.” I glance down at my closed hand. “It means, peace visits not the guilty mind.” Those debilitating thoughts which plague the guilty, we’re offered no peace to rest. “First from the book is Isiah, then later, Ozzy Osbourne.”

I lower the window and open my hand, allowing the moth to float away. If the moth survives, I can’t stop it from returning to its source of pain, just like I can’t stop myself from being drawn to Kallum. It’s the light we’re drawn to. The light is so lovely it’s blinding. Some cages, we design for ourselves.

🦋🌙

When we achieve superiority over humanity, we in turn become exiled from it, as obtaining everything we desire is a descent into a solitary abyss. In the end, stripped of the very thing which gives him the hope, the very will to live, his immortality becomes a death sentence. Oh, the fucking irony. Love is nothing if not punishing.

“Nietzsche used Greek tragedies to express how life is cruel and unfair, how illogical our suffering can be.”

Alchemy’s stones and elixirs, the endless quest for eternal life. But what is eternity if spent without the fire of your twin flame?

Fear of loss is such a brutal bitch. But hope… Hope is a cruel and sadistic monster, one of our own desperate design. Yet even the most monstrous of us cling to the frail wisp of it.

The tip of the iceberg is where our conscious exists. The layer right beneath the frigid water is the preconscious. And the rest of the berg below is the unconscious. It is in this vast region below the water where the psychological forces of the psyche reside, there in the dark, endless void.

Homer wrote: Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed.

The harder we deny our nature, the more painful our existence. I stopped resisting my demon the moment my muse entered my world. I surrendered to the primal violence that wanted to dominate my atoms when she called out for me, when she needed me. Hell, I became the villain for her. And I owned the bloodthirsty monster who fed on chaos and carnage, like I own that monster now.

“Tell me to taste you,” I demand. “Not like this. Go to hell⁠—” “Then you can curse me while you come in my mouth.”

😏🔥💕

“Do you still despise me?” Struggling to capture a full breath, she says, “Yes.” I smile against her. “I’m going to fill you so deeply, there’s no room to hate me.”

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. Let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster. CARL JUNG

No, muses aren’t supposed to inspire death. In that moment, I shed the layers as a victim of loss and became a huntress like Artemis, the goddess of the hunt and moon, a vengeful deity.

It’s the connection of the twin flame. Once your other half is found, if divided, it will consume and devour everything in its path like the fires of hell to be reunited. It’s the course.

“Question everything,”

Nietzsche once said: To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.

It’s how we deal with our fear that determines what our outcome will be.

A thousand love stories told through the ages and one moral endures: The darkest love kindles the brightest hope.