Thamani, a cream-pelted lion, with hints of beige as the moonlight strikes directly through the follicles of his dense fur, walks across the dried scenario that dominates the appearance of the plain of the savannah. Every step taken by the lion seems extremely heavy as if there's a giant rock attached to the double pairs of his ankles. His eyes are narrowly open; you can barely see his dark blue pupils; his tail behavior is also concerning; you can see it bouncing loose, and pointed to the ground as its tuft marks get dragged across the dirty floor of the desert. 


By his side, there's a cheetah, blessed with the grace of the charm that only a spotted big cat can earn; full of energy, the cheetah has a translucent aura that transmits an incomparable magnetism, easily attractive to innocent and immature felines, like Thamani once was. Both cheetah and lion work as a counterpart to each other: the dark side and the bright side, the sadness and the happiness, the goodness and the evilness. Both of the felines are making their way to an unknown destiny. 


“Do you remember when you fell over your face trying to catch a bird on the top of a tree?” Asks the cheetah.


“Yes….I do.” Answers Thamani, carrying a neutral expression across his face; deep inside, the lion could feel a bittersweet taste that irradiates from the bottom of his heart. 


“... In front of everyone?...” Whispers the cheetah, laying a paw across the larger feline’s back, which is covered by a smaller patch of his mane, working as some kind of exit for the larger patch of his hair that covers most of his face as the wind prevents the thick strands that fall upon his forehead to touch his eyes. 


“Yes… I do.” Answers Thamani as he manages to maintain the same blank expression that he had since the first question. 


“Do you remember how they were laughing at you?” The cheetah starts a shameless laugh, intense enough to fill up his eyelids with tears of joy that overflow and fall in a perfect line with the thin black marks on its spotted fur that ‘leaks” from its inferior eyelid to the top of the sides of his upper lips. 


“C-can you please, stop?” Asks Thamani, maintaining his sight focused on what's on his front, never looking at his sides, where usually his cheetah friend tends to be jumping and running in circles as it chases its own cheetah tail. 
“My energy is from a blink to finish, and we still have a job to do…” Thamani immediately yawns, feeling his eyes getting heavier as he feels the tiny particles of sand under his paw pads, be swiped to bigger boulders that generally hurt his paws as he keeps walking through the path he must pursue. 


“A-are you angry at me?” Asks the cheetah, who once again had tears in its eyes; this time those tears are the product of a broken heart.


“I didn't mean to harm you… Please! Forgive me!” The cheetah starts to cry loudly, bringing its face down and covering its face with its front paws; fluids are also leaving both of the Cheetah's nostrils as multiple tears keep rolling down the cheeks of the spotted feline.


Thamani steps are gradually slowing down, finally stopping as he reaches the border to a place with no visible surface; the ground is covered by a dense white mist as it consumes the moonlight that timidly gets hidden within the dense cloud that fills the sky above the cats. The large brown-maned lion closes his eyes, sighing before starts whispering from the distance to the emotional cheetah, never looking back to the place where the cheetah is reduced to a waterfall of tears:
“You didn't hurt me!” Thamani’s docile tone seems to soothe the cheetah, which is his main desire since the trip cannot thrive in a successful experience if one of the main components involved in this adventure is emotionally unstable. 
“Please… stop crying. We have to go!” Thamani's voice trembles as the impatience over this situation seems to be slowly poisoning the leonine’s usually calm mood, and a mood swing is not appropriate for the moment. 


Despite all the odds in the situation, luckily, the crying of the emotional cheetah seems to be in the past. In less than a second, the spotted feline runs towards Thamani and immediately throws its body against the side of the larger feline, rubbing its spots against the lion’s eccentric hue of his fur. 


“You are lucky that I love you more than anything else…” The cheetah blushes, trying to build up some kind of visual contact with the lion, exposing the reddish-brown hue of its pupils; however, the lion seems indifferent; in his eyes, you see nothing despite an intangible glow against his black pupils that is provided by the glowing mist that surrounds the path ahead. 


The cheetah feels its snout rubbing against the length of the side of the body of the lion as he moves forward; the contact of the cheetah’s moisty snout with the lion’s dense fur divides the perimeter where its snout is making contact with into two factions, but never leaving any glistening or wet mark on the area it made contact if; it seems like Thamani passed through an intangible body since he didn't express any type of reaction to the cheetah’s snout. 


“Wait for me!” The cheetah yells as it observes the lion disappearing through the dense mist ahead.
The interspecies duo walks side by side; every step that Thamani takes is also taken by the cheetah as if the spotted cat is nothing more than a shadow, pursuing its provider as it walks beneath the sunlight. The mist gets denser as both cheetah and lion feel the impact of the thin drizzle that composes the gelid mist that flows through the ether violently as the wind scatters the dry leaves of the autumn. 


“Do you know where we are?” Asks the cheetah, keeping eyes on Thamani's back as he leads the path they must follow; the spotted feline couldn't see a tree in front of them if there was one that close, while Thamani seems to have not lost the sense of his direction. 


“Here we are….” Thamani announces, immediately sitting and keeping his eyes away from the cheetah that quickly pairs with him and sits; the cheetah stares at the face of the lion, once again, needy of attention, it is still seeking to build a connection with the larger feline


“Is that the one who hurt you?” Asks Thamani, seriously staring at the blank ahead of him.


“Wh-....” The cheetah seems confused at first, but it quickly seems to catch up with the situation.
“Yes…. It tried to separate us…” The cheetah’s voice tone turns into an aggressive growl as the skin of the patch above its snout wrinkles. 


“Okay….” Thamani gives two steps ahead, forward the blank where the supposed antagonist of this story is standing. 


“It tried to abduct me…” The cheetah states while the fur of its back starts to shiver and lift as a form of intimidation. “... It tried to separate us, soulmates, from each other…”


The cheetah continues “We belong together! No one should ever try to be between you and me! I love you…”


Thamani moves cautiously; a step is given gradually, followed by another; his foe is supposed to be closer than before, it’s closer than it was before that latter step was given. Meanwhile, the cheetah yells its final words before finding the real nature of its rival. 


“No one ever made me feel what I feel for you…” A tear slides down the cheetah's cheek as its tongue moves elaborating the sound of the combination of consonants and vowels that compose the word ‘you’.


“Are you sure about that?” Asks Thamani as he finally allows his eyes to find contact with the Cheetah's eyes; however, there's something strange about the figure that observes the spotted feline; that figure is supposed to be Thamani, but the look in his eyes is reversed, so his scar is; actually, his body appearance seems to be reversed in the eyes of the cheetah. 


“W-what's that?” The cheetah asks desperately. 


“Your foe….” Thamani's words may make no sense at first, but as soon as he takes an attacking position, aiming straight at the reversed figure of himself and attacking using his head, instead of his claws, that mirrored image, the response is clear: the image of that foe disappears as cracks start appearing and taking place at the surface of that object that once held Thamani's reversed figure. 


Pieces of glass start to fall over Thamani's brown mane; a sharped-edged piece sticks onto the male lion’s face, a small vessel seems torn as blood starts pouring from the wound; a large trace of the red fluid rolls down his snout, crossing his lips as it meets its way on the path, until the edge of the chin of the feline.


“I d-don’t understand…” The cheetah is visibly confused and saddened; the lion falls over his feet stoically, despite the wounds that were caused by the rupture of the mirror, which was dramatically revealed to be the real nature of the supposed rival of the cheetah. The mist that once robbed the appearance of this particular ‘venue’ has given place to a sky full of stars with the moon at the exact center of the celestial sphere. The mist is still visible, but only on the horizon, loosening the limits between the sky and the green hills that circle that mysterious place. 


“You should…. You know exactly what that is…” 
Explains Thamani, standing against the whispering wind in counterpart to the cheetah that stands at the same side where the wind blows. 


“You know you are nothing but a memory….” Thamani states as he feels his heartbeat pacing while a warm and uncomfortable feeling brews inside his digestive system. 


“.... A memory of a past I can't let go because….”
Thamani's voice cracks, he closes his eyes as he feels a horrendous urge to cry, trying to battle against that feeling, he knows he can't demonstrate any kind of regret towards the cheetah that's nothing more than a simple unrealistic body molded by his brain to fulfill the emptiness left behind after abandoning a past that he could never return. 


“Because I loved every part of it…. But it was extremely prejudicial for me because it was running against my gist…” Thamani sighs as he feels his legs trembling; the sadness is portrayed on his face; with his eyes closed, a lucky tear slides through the encounter of his eyelids and leaks towards the side of his left eye.


“Then… that's why you didn't let me go! You loved every part of what I represent!” The cheetah smiles, imagining its words would heal any kind of wound that was caused by Thamani’s realization; however, the lion found a way out of the matrix he put himself into. 


“No… I hated it! I suffered because I was seeking something I didn't want for real. I was seeking something that would make me happy for a couple of minutes, and then…. I would go back to the poor state I was in before I met you ....”
Thamani slams his left front paw against the ground; the blast caused by that simple action would be easily compared to the blast of  thunder in the middle of a tropical storm. 


“Then… why didn't you let me go?” Asks the cheetah, its eyes are wide open, while its pupils are dilated as the reddish hue of its iris slowly disappears from the viewer’s sight; tears are lubricating the surface of its eyeballs, giving away the reason why it's vibrating and extremely expressive. 


“It's hard to let you go….” Thamani answers as a single drip of the blood thread that was rolling down his face and slowly accumulating beneath his chin falls onto the ground due to the accumulated weight of the liquid that's still leaking from the wound caused by the impact of a cell of the glass that was composing the mirror where he slammed into.


“.... But it's also pretty hard to revisit the past every day I wake up and think about everything I've done and everything I should have done instead…” 
Thamani feels the taste of his blood invading his mouth as he watches the cheetah, once a loyal companion, a vivid gift from the past, and an innocent game, start to dematerialize in front of his eyes. 


“.... I am sorry… “ The cheetah answers as its backward starts to become translucent; shiny and yellow particles seem to be leaving the matter that composes the body of the cheetah; those particles rise towards the sky and eventually lose energy as they camouflage among the other stars and disappear from the viewer's sight. 


“No, I am the one who is sorry…. This was never meant to last…” Thamani smiles painfully as he feels the emptiness of the disappearance of a memory that was viciously overused occupying the place that was once dominated by regret and sorrow. 


“You know this ain't the last time we see each other, right?” Asks the cheetah, with half of its face translucent while the rest of its body is gone. 


“I know…” Answers Thamani.


“What are you going to do?” Asks the cheetah.


“Nothing….” Answers Thamani. 


‘What do you mean with “nothing”’ Asks the cheetah;
“Are you going to try looking for new friends? For a new love? For a new objective?” The cheetah complements its question as the left side of its face fades away.


“No…. I am not looking after anything like that….” Thamani answers, looking at the cheetah’s remaining eye disappearing as it rises towards the sky in the form of glistening dust.


Looking towards the stars, filling the universe above his own self-conscious universe, Thamani whispers:
“I will be doing what I've been doing since the day I was cursed….. I will be waiting for the end”