My name is Phosgene and I am on death row.

All I can hear these days is the constant tick-tocking of the giant clock. Tick tock, tick tock. It continues to taunt me. I can feel the sands of time slipping through my fingers. The Others tell me I don't have much longer. If I fail to achieve my purpose, then I will be gone. It would be easy to push me straight back into the lake and pull another likeness of me out. A better model, with a different name and a different mission.

Strictly speaking, I have already achieved my life purpose, so anything surplus to that is a bonus. I am like Melody Pond. I'm the kid who killed The Doctor. I asked a lot of questions. I'm not sure which one of them made the silence fall, but one of them did. She might still be living and breathing now, but she will be gone in the near future. At the end of the day, I am young and healthy. I can't say the same for my nemesis.

I've been called a lot of things. In the past, this body has been a lot of people. Technically speaking, I am the child of Faith and Lucifer. Both of them took their turns at running the body. Both of them failed.

*
Faith was destroyed by the younger alters. These so-called fragments cut into her like glass. Their pain became her pain, and she couldn't let them go. So she resigned and Lucifer took over. He destroyed a lot of other people, and was eventually kicked out of office.

At the end of the day, Faith simply couldn't live with what she had done to the child, and Lucifer was too destructive to be a functional alter. So they created another, together. Faith contributed her innocence, compassion and photographic memory, Lucifer gave her his strength, focus and intelligence. They named the child Phosgene. The name made sense. It meant "bringer of light", just like Lucifer, it was the name of the chemical which had caused the silence to fall, and the Original Child's middle name had been Gene.

Phosgene had promise. It had a nice ring to it. And when she rose, she reflected the sun’s light like a mirror. Her pupils shone like black pearls. Because of this, Faith had wanted to call the child "Belladonna", but she had been overruled by Lucifer.

Lucifer made sure Phosgene understood irony. Faith tried and failed to get Phosgene to love herself. If either one of them had been functional adult parents, they would have heard and understood the threat "Winter is Coming." But they were both too wrapped up in their own lives. Winter arrived, set up shop in Faith's back yard, and then froze everything and everyone, before either Faith or Lucifer realized that summer had gone away.

Phosgene shone like an obsidian mirror in the dying light. If either of her parents had been watching, they might have seen the monster reflected in her eyes. Phosgene's eyes, big and dark, glazed over for a moment, before turning blue and taking on a different expression. Her faced changed, taking on an icy coldness quite unlike her usual face.

The monster stopped, saw herself reflected in Phosgene's eyes, and decided she didn't like what she saw. She swung her ice axe at her own reflected face, shattering the mirror of dragonglass into a million pieces. The bigger pieces, such as Faith and Lucifer, formed alters. The smaller ones formed a million tiny fragments.

More than once, Faith tried to piece the mirror back together. But there were too many pieces missing. Although none of them knew it at the time, one of the pieces had lodged itself in the monster's neck. A shard of dragonglass from the mirror she had broken would eventually kill the Other Mother. For dragon glass was kryptonite to the White Walker.

By this point, Lucifer had left Faith and was busy bonking blue-eyed women, replicas of The Jabberwocky who had destroyed his child. Faith, meanwhile, had vanished, seemingly in to thin air. She would rise again twelve years later, when the ghosts of all the children she had let die began to drive her insane.

Phosgene would remember none of this. Grimhilde's viral encoding had wiped her of both Faith and the photographic memory, and as she had discovered, forgetting things had its uses. Until one day, Lucifer dragged Phosgene back out of the lake, and gave her a name and a mission: She was Phosgene. She would be the Alter that would unite all the other Alters. She would weave a story that brought them all together and reminded them that they were all fighting the same monster. She would shine a light. She would lead the way, and others would follow. And in the process, they would all learn about how The Following Game was played. The mirror would be pieced back together, and when it was, the monster reflected in it would be brought to justice. By light of truth, the battle would be won.

The shard of dragonglass, however, had other ideas. It wanted to kill the White Walker at any cost.
*

It appears that I am fighting both ice and fire. My parents have given up on me. I see Lucifer looking to the sky, as if waiting for a falling star to become his next dream. Faith looks to the lake, and wonders if she could do better with another fragment next time. Only, there will never be a next time.

I've seen it happen before. I might not be perfect, but they need me. For I am the generator of light. Without me, Faith and Lucifer and all the rest of them would fall back into darkness.

How does one convince one's other personalities not to give up on them?

(***This is fiction it did not really happen. Any people, alters, monsters or Evil Queens are figments of my overactive imagination, and are not intended to convey any information about any real people. Any resemblance between any characters in this post and any real people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No one has been defamed in the writing of this post and no one's copyright has been infringed***)

If you stir the clouds back into your coffee, do they go away? I doubt it. Like sugar particles dissolved in water, they vanish from view, but the coffee will always be sweeter.

I sit here, clearing the cookies from my browser, trying to pick the clouds off the top of my latte with a spoon. I hate clearing cookies. It makes me think of cookies. I see cookies, I smell cookies, and I want to eat cookies. But I'm not allowed.

I'm highly intolerant to gluten, even in small amounts. I haven't officially been diagnosed as allergic, but going off gluten cured my cyclic vomiting and IBS and made me lose 25kg. I try not to eat sugar, but lately, I have been failing at that. And now, I want cookies, chocolate chip ones to be precise. They have be real chocolate chips, not compound chocolate. Something about the texture of hydrogenated vegetable fats makes my stomach spin.

Once you start thinking about cookies, or any other food for that matter, you have lost the game. I need to think about something else. But what could possibly be more enticing than the thought of food? Sex, maybe. Or drugs. Or possibly Game of Thrones.