#me: *DESPERATELY PUSHING ILSE TOWARD HER* PLEASE I'M BEGGING U

[andessence]

‘ i see how you labor beneath that load: afraid to look up, and afraid to let go. ’ from ilse for moritz!

hadestown starters

Ilse’s gaze on her seems the HEAVIEST LOAD she’s ever borne. She can’t meet it, though the flickering of her eyes to her childhood friend suggests that she’s trying desperately. It suggests that she doesn’t want Ilse to see that she’s RIGHT.

She doesn’t need this new torture, ultimately nothing more than the newest burr catching her as she makes the feverish break for freedom — for  P E A C E .  The world scrapes and grasps at her more violently now that she realizes how to escape it, as if it hated her for discovering the secret that NONE OF IT MATTERS. All an illusion! All the noxious fumes, refuse of the æther swirling into twisted, cruel forms that mock the SUBLIMITY beyond them from which they came! She was going to break the chains at last and find that higher form. She just had to shake off this burr.

“Ilse, you don’t see anything. You don’t know the first thing about—! You’ve been with the artists too long, and sound like them; everything has deeper meaning; everything sounds profound.” She wants to draw the words up sharp and fatal, but her tongue is thick and her mouth dry. The retort is dull, DEAD already as it falls from her lips. “But it isn’t always. Sometimes a look is just a look. ——— It’s getting dark. You should go home.”