I went off to fight some battle that I'd invented inside my head

Last night, I tried to make a dress. I got farther than I'd gotten previously, I still have the skirt to do, but...my concentration was flawed. I spoke with that one, and...we are not yet dead, we are not dead, we are...still postponing, but that still makes it hurt to breathe.

I needed to speak openly, something I can now not do with my friends, with those closest to me, something I cannot do with friends of his, and not because I fear tainting them, but because I have been bound from speech at all.

I thought it was time. I needed to return once more to the crypt of my fallen princeling, speak to his brittle bones, rant my pain to the universe...but he has been unearthed.

Literally.



When I arrived at the home of the Transylvanians, the Forsaken family crypt, I found myself standing on sharp dark stones, staring at a river of lava pouring from the mountains' heights. This was not the cool dark undertunnels of the family home I remembered, the Italianate manse built over the old pirates' smuggling bay, cool lapping of distant water in the subbasements, as I meandered my way to the bones of my lost love.

This was...frightening, in a way. Had the manse been moved? Was that it?



I descended, carefully hovering, from the heights down the side, where I could dimly see structures, and...now my heart was in my throat. They'd all been slain, I knew this now, because...those were palm trees, goddamn it. Palm trees and tiki huts and what in the seven hells was going on???



I descended further, following little pools of gleaming blue water over glimmering pink--pink! PINK!!--sands, to the largest of the tiki huts I could see. There were surfboards in front of it. My heart sank. I knew I was in the Forsaken sim. What on earth had happened?



Hovering further down the beach, flinching at the beach towels and the fishing competition rods and the pale marble wedding pavilion...I find something that resembles the Forsaken manse I'd known. Italianate...vaguely...and open-air, but...it was something. I made for it, intending to track down secret passages inside.



It was a ballroom. The stairs up led upstairs. There was...nothing else, nothing underneath, nothing but more sand and the foundation.



I looked. I sent my consciousness out, forth, descending below the level of the marble tiles, and stared in numb incomprehension at the blue blue water lapping at the pink sands of the foundation under the ballroom stones.



I tracked down a teleportation hub, and spent some time traveling to every location listed. My lost princeling's remains were in none of them. Finally, I took courage in hand and went to the cave I'd noticed under the river of lava. It was guarded by some dark creature indeed, and I had to narrowly edge past the burning brands of his eyes.



It was hot, in the cave under the river of lava. That's an understatement, really, but it's true--the floor was slowly cooling lava, the stereo system and furnishings scattered about on the burning stones mystically enchanted not to burn. I touched foot to floor once, thinking I was wrong, and quickly shot to hovering distance again.

I'll regrow that, but I do not like the smell of me burning.



I'd done everything I could to find him. I sent a mental message, resonating with shock, to the head of the Forsaken clan, the Transylvanians now ensconced in their cosy pink-sand abode. She sent back word to me that the current flavor of my lost prince had wronged her, deeply, and she had destroyed his crypt because she would never, never forgive him.

*hangs her head*

Seems to be a lot of that going around...

I still have his soul. I have some small few other items remaining. I may make my own reliquary, but...it will not be the same. It will not have the impact of scenting his bones on the air, the ash and the calcium slowly falling to dust. It will not be the same at all...