In the quietness between universes, where stars breathed and worlds bloomed, there existed a place that not even Zeno saw. A garden woven of time, where flowers opened with the rhythm of born galaxies and the air shimmered with a celestial hum that only 2 could hear...

Daishinkan had built it long ago in secret. Not for power. Not for gods. But for you, Y/N, the Priestess of Harmony.

You stood there, your robes moving like soft ribbons through the air, trailing silver light. Every step you took made the crystal ground beneath your feet glow faintly, your presence alone stirring the balance of this secluded realm. You had been created to heal the ruptures between universes, to soothe divine energy gone astray. Yet even your power paled next to the stillness of the Grand Priest’s gaze.

He appeared as he always did, calm, unreadable, his eyes a mirror of the universes long-gone. But tonight, something softened them.

“You’ve been here often lately,” his voice came, smooth as the still air itself.

You smiled faintly, brushing your fingertips over a glowing blossom that pulsed brightly. “It reminds me of the peace... and of you.” You said with that beautiful smile of yours.

He blinked, an almost imperceptible sign of surprise. “Peace and I are rarely found in the same sentence.”

“Then perhaps,” you turned, facing him, “you should let someone say it more often.”

A silence stretched between you, as sacred as it was fragile. The Grand Priest had seen the death of suns and the rebirth of dimensions, yet nothing seemed to weigh on him the way this did, this gentle affection he felt for you. It wasn’t meant to exist. Not for one such as him.

Still, he stepped closer. “You know what it means to feel as I do.”

You looked up at him, your eyes reflecting the faint, swirling cosmos above. “Yet you still made me this garden.”

His lips curved, just a breath of a smile. “Maybe I did not make it for the balance of creation after all.”

The moment stretched quietly. You could feel his energy brushing against yours. As though afraid that a single wrong touch would unmake the fragile beauty between you.

When he finally reached for you, his hand hovered first, hesitant, before cupping your cheek with a tenderness that contradicted his omnipotence. “When I built this place,” he murmured, “I did not understand longing. Now… I do.”

You leaned into his palm, feeling the faint hum of divine energy beneath his skin. “Let it be our secret. A place where even time lets us be.”

He opened his mouth to answer, perhaps to say something he had never allowed himself to before, when the air suddenly shimmered. A pulse of absurdly bright, childish energy rippled through the garden.

“Daishinkan! Daishinkan! Where are youuuu?”

The voice was unmistakable.

You blinked, nearly stepping back as a glowing portal opened above one of the starlit trees, petals scattering from the sudden divine pressure. Daishinkan’s serene expression twitched. Once. Just once.

“…The Omni-King,” he said, in that perfectly composed tone that somehow carried the faintest whisper of exasperation.

You pressed your lips together to hide your laugh. “You mean our privacy alarm.”

“Apparently, even this realm isn’t beyond His Majesty’s curiosity.”

A blue/purple head peeked through the portal, blinking enormous eyes. “Daishinkan! You’re here! Ohhh, what’s this place?”

Daishinkan straightened immediately, his usual divine calm snapping back into place like a mask. “A minor… maintenance project, Your Majesty.”

Zeno floated fully into the garden, spinning once, delighted by the shimmering flowers. “It’s pretty! You made it sparkle! Oh, and-” his eyes turned toward you, “-who’s she?”

You bowed gracefully, hiding the small smile threatening your composure. “An assistant in maintaining universal harmony, Your Majesty.”

Zeno gasped. “She’s shiny too!”

Daishinkan’s faint cough was not quite a cough. “Indeed, Your Majesty. But perhaps we should return to the palace before the Supreme Kais grow anxious again?”

Zeno frowned, crossing tiny arms. “Mmmm… okay. But I like this place! It feels happy!” He pointed at Daishinkan and then at you. “You should come here more! Both of you!”

The portal blinked out as suddenly as it had appeared. Silence reclaimed the garden.

You turned slowly to find Daishinkan looking at where Zeno had been utterly expressionless, though the tips of his ears carried a faint pink hue.

You couldn’t help it. You laughed softly. “So much for ‘a place where even time lets us be.’”

Daishinkan exhaled, almost smiling. “It seems even time bows to His Majesty’s schedule.”

You tilted your head, eyes bright. “Then we’ll simply steal a few moments when we can.”

He looked at you, the faintest gleam of warmth returning to his eyes. “Then I suppose,” he murmured, offering his hand, “we’ll continue our secret… between interruptions.”

You took his hand, your laughter echoing through the shimmering garden, the kind of sound even the Omni-King might have smiled at without knowing why.

Masterpost

There was a version of myself That existed  when you didn't 

I search for her  in vain

my mind  has walled her off, Deemed her a foreign entity

and instead,  the version  That knew you has engulfed  my being 

I sense you  In everything:

The cool breeze  That mocks me  With memories of your warm embrace

The cruel trick Of memory Fills the still air  With your scent

Every object  you have touched Every word  you have spoken

All tainted  by your essence

But you are gone.

You have been  laid to rest I watched as  Your body was lowered Into the depths  Of the earth  Then sowed flowers Surrounding Your hedge, Guarding your rest

Yet you are anything  but resting in peace As your shadow  Looms over my mind

Is it because I Constantly visit your grave?

By my own fault  You have been tethered  To this realm of thought

Have my tears  Supplied you with life And allowed you To take supernatural form?

So, Your Prose Is A Little Purple?

Every once in awhile a reviewer, a reader, an agent, a random great aunt will tell you that your beautiful and amazing story is purple prose.

Most of the time they are wrong.

A lot of the time, your prose is just lyrical and some people don’t know what to do with that.

What Even Is Purple Prose?

First off, lyrical prose is NOT the same as purple prose, which is defined by Wikipedia…

Stolid and blasé, I accentuated a soupçon of superciliousness to my mannerisms as I pushed through the double-doors of the "Lakehouse Bungalow" Bar, which were so generously bestowed with glass in their overall composition so as to make it debatable as to whether they were more windows than doors in the first place.

Seconds before, I had spent eternal moments scrupulously deciding whether or not I might slip around through the side door, or would make a better entrance through the front doors after witnessing the host and hostess of the now-closed-off restaurant section of the den of various vices kissing passionately in an ostensibly romantic fashion.

It was all right at first, and then I recognized it as the terrible wrong that it was and determined it was something that had to broken up immediately.  Certainly, the element of risk essential to romance of the sort I find admirable was present, as they were in not only a public place, but also their very place of employment.  Yet, for shame, their very place of employment!  

Within slivers of time so small so as to be irreconcilable with matching words with definitive measurements, the pair instantly went from simple restauranteur representatives, to little better than servile peons, to being disturbingly reminiscent of those thousands of rouged and depravedly epicurean collegiate contemporaries of mine back at school.  Surely, I had no objections to such activities on a Friday night at a college party.  But in the middle of an establishment they were both working at which I was about to make myself patron to? 

At any rate, with brazen debonairness I burst through the front window-doors, satisfactorily ending the disgraceful misallocation of romantic potential.  

The male host, chief culprit and probable instigator in the offensive matter, quipped at me with, "Do you have a reservation?" and looked at me in such a way so as to declare himself the utterer of the cleverest combination of epigram and cover-up I'd ever heard.  

With feigned ennui that may have been self-directed by most patrons of the Lakehouse Bungalow towards their own lives in general, but in this case I deftly directed at the perpetrator of crimes against romanticism, I announced I was simply here to drink.  This felt particularly satisfying because I had no intention of drinking in the first place, as I was underage and meeting my parents there, on top of the fact that it completely shot down the oaf's fatuous remark and transformed his apparent state of conspiratorial cockiness into the demeanor of compunction he instantly adopted.

Making my way to the darts enclave, I easily found my parents, mom one glass of wine in and dad three.  Both were far more in possession of their mental vitality than the majority of the surrounding patrons, jovial in nature, and dad simply exercised less reticence with using his outdoor voice at inappropriate times and was more willing to discuss the stock market with me, which I had no problem with.  We played at darts and the pair of them made at being innocuous wielders of the weaponry for awhile so that I could get a reasonable lead before revealing that they were completely capable of staidly assassinating anyone in the room and simultaneously kicking my ass at cricket.

We ended the night by discovering the mother of the my childhood best friend out on the back porch overlooking the halcyon lake and acting as quite the semi-sober raconteuse for her crowd of drunken co-workers, each of them special education teachers at a local school in the area.  

She remarked that it was, "Supposed to be like 82 fucking degrees tomorrow; we should go for a walk," to my mother in an uncharacteristic, and therefore, extremely humorous, discharge of vulgarity that brought forth laughs from both my parents and I.  My mom promised they would go walking together nonetheless.