It's Still Life

24 of 27: Briarthrest – The restlessness that follows after healing

I. After the Breaking:
It doesn’t come while you’re breaking.
It comes afterward,
the moment you find yourself
unmoored from ache.

It’s not the wound.
Not the grief,
but a chair empty at the table.
You learned to eat alone.
You stopped setting a place.

II. After the Healing:
It is what the body does
when the soul has finished mourning,
when the silence that once soothed
begins to feel like wool in the throat.

The soles of your feet remember—
every path not taken.
It itches beneath the skin
like a second skeleton.
It’s an itch, not of pain—
but of potential.

Restlessness is not a flaw.
It is the echo of movement remembered.

III. The Road Trip
She invited a man to the edges of her exile—
not to complete her,
but to bear witness
while she reacquainted herself
with her own skin.

Not to hide, not to recover,
but to remember that she was hers alone.
She came to harvest silence,
to let the wind
peel her back like a rind—
revealing the pulp of what next.

He did not tame her.
He kept the fire stoked while she wandered the ash.

IV. After the Crow:
He stayed in the Highlands.
He belonged to the place the way—
lichen belongs to stone—
without explanation.

He knew her silences;
heard them the way some hear chords—
the unresolved ones,
the minor ones.

It was about realising her voice
no longer fit
its old silence.
And that was not betrayal—only growth.

V. After the Map Unfolds:
She will walk now—
not toward,
not away,
but parallel
to the woman she was
before the breaking.

She is Briarthrest:
two colours woven into a third
that has no name yet.

She is not your shadow.
You are not her light.
She is the space between.

VI. After the Revelation:
Briarthrest curls around her ankles,
a subtle pull of “what next.”

The tea leaves at the bottom of her cup
spell nothing.
The robin’s stare means less.
The crow was never waiting.

This is freedom:
the unbearable lightness
of being
almost
ready.

She is not lost.
She is only not found yet.

VII. After the Understanding:
She will pack a bag with:
– one knife (for the bread)
– one vial of crushed hawthorn berries (for tea)
– two feathers (the crow’s—her own)

The door sighs when she opens it.
The sky does not applaud.

This, too, is a kind of love.
The kind that does not follow.
The kind that does not stop you.

VIII. Felreil’s Notes in The Book of 27
It resists.
It is not a colour—it is a vibration.
To contain it is to press a thumb
against a pulse and call the vein blue.
It stains the glass from within,
as if the bottle itself is restless.

Of the Naming:
Briarthrest is the sound of a crow’s wing catching light
after the wind has died.
A hue that exists only
in the wake of enough.

The one called Brigid:
She thinks she is leaving.
Fool.
She is becoming—
a verb pressed between pages too soon.

Unresolved:
This colour thrives in minor chords.
In the space between I was and I will be.
It is the opposite of mourning,
yet wears mourning’s face.

Ask me, someday,
why the 27th glyph avoids it.
For now, I lick it from my fingers like stolen honey.

Crow’s Omen:
The bird is a syllable she mistook for a companion.
When she goes, it will unravel
into seven crows,
then seven hundred.
This is how Briarthrest multiplies:
in the arithmetic of unattended thresholds.

Aftermath:
For three breaths,
the glyphs rearranged into a word
that I dared not speak.

Then … nothing.
Only the faint scent of hawthorn,
and the knowledge that some colours
are not meant to be kept,
but passed through.

The Observation:
Briarthrest is the first colour
to ever look back at me.
It asks no questions.
It already knows.
Gods above help me—
I want to drink it.