Had he been given the option, he would have remained unmoored, adrift, for the remainder of eternity. A black star amid the lightly kissed sheet of night, untethered from his perpetuity upon solid ground; a soul set free by the rending jaws of an Outland woman. Even among the moons, even bedded between galaxies, he could feel how her fangs scissored his throat, sheathing the pliant ebony of his neck in red, red, red.
A death knell, their cries. Her, one of betrayal and wrath as his horn drove home—his, a snarling cackle of inevitable defeat as he dragged his body from her corpse, crawling towards a patch of moonlight upon the ruined, ashen plain of Edana. There was nothing merciful beneath the hoary gaze of his midnight queen: seated upon her throne, coiffed to her crescent perfection as she passed her judgment upon his heaving breath.
One after another, each was too many—and he choked upon her lawlessness, his scarred lips twisted with morose satisfaction at the lull of their final intimacy; his last, precious moment beneath the stars.
He had died before the passing of dawn, his head limp among the soot and the cinder as the sun crested its horizon. And she had taken him to her breast, her embrace as amorous as a lover, and cradled him covetously close.
☾
But even death, it would seem, could not be permanent for the Shadeling.
How long ago his eyes had drawn open, his chest heaving breath, he could not say for certain. He lay upon his side, amid the grasses that fringed the still Denoctian waters. It was only fitting that he had returned to the living come nightfall, just another shadow upon the land; a spread of silken ebony, pooled and tattered upon Vitreus’ lake. As weak as he was revitalized; a incensed as he was placid. His veins coiled through his body with tepid, virile dissatisfaction—a man plundered and driven from his lover’s bed too soon; as though living was no longer enough.
And beyond the Shadeling’s discontent lay a deeper, darker misery. An inescapable loneliness that pierced his chest with knives, with fangs, with claws—he had bled many a time for his moon, for his midnight, and yet—
She had left him with nothing. He could feel the age within his bones, the vacancy within his marrow, where power ought to have lain. The shadows did not heed his muttered song, and all he could speak of his dismay was a throaty, battered laugh.
Enamored as ever with her games, the moon-white of his eyes tilted heavenward, slotting their gaze together with vindication—with reverence.
He was a wanton pawn of the nighttime fate, and he gathered himself slowly to all fours, the world teetering, as he heeded the gentle whistle of wind that caused the lake’s waters to ripple. Like the tide, like the mirror sheen of great waters, he heeded the allure of the moon with only mild bitterness upon his tongue.
Mingled with coppery blood, from where his teeth had ground together before his waking hours.
Hraefn pulled upon the tenebrous whims of the world once more, demanding the shadows heed his call.
They did not.
His smile was slow; sardonic. It was starved, voracious, as he looked towards the skies with a languid, drawling breath.
The unquiet darkness, suffuse with the way a city tends to seethe only at night. Festal and defiant, throwing off the yoke of daylit expectation, basking in the nakedness and the way that nakedness feels in the cold touch of eventide.
She dreams of the inebriate hoards. The shambling, listing forms—like libidinous ships on cobbled seas—lurching in and out of oily lamplight, singing unblushing sailor’s shanties. They pass her in the dark, pulled by an undertow to islands of unwashed light, spilling forth from the thrown opened doors of taverns and pleasure houses. They are drawn in by the soft siren songs of ale and thighs and the uncomfortable closeness that breeds all manner of delights and social decay.
They bash themselves upon the rocks of that saturnalia.
But not she.
She is bound for the annihilation of another lightless isle.
★
Had it been preordained that had she should meet him then?
Writ in the extinct stars she had navigated by, through streets paved in precarious moonshine and marble monuments to a doomed noblesse? Woven into the tapestry of time—her, under the libertine caresses of kin-starshed; he, beguiling worshipper at an altar of an eternal, stygian grace.
Was it chance that they should come together again, here?
Like two cruel and foolish gravities?
He is more man than she remembers. Unveiled and barbed in the dull, blooming radiance of night, exposing the raw, sable flesh that had always been below the bygone obedience of shadow. She has long harboured errant slips of his darkness, sewn into pink and lilac soil the night she let him take her as a sacrifice to an eyeless, unkind idol. There, it had grown, like dark gardens in the vacancies of her soul.
If she could, she would let him harvest from her.
After all this time.
But they are hers now, fetishes of a heaving, throbbing, visceral madness and desire that still slips like silk across her being when the sun disappears below the horizon, clutched like a sentimental favor to her breast. It it mutinous and self-destructive, but she can’t purge him and the memory of him from her. They are moored to the loneliness and the disillusionment that has constructed great, golden cities of want and need inside her. They are flowers and weeds in the soil beds of her own blossoming sense of self.
He had become the prince of some paradisiac kingdom in the sky, a land of milk and honey.
But when Laela had split open the belly of the Outlands and released upon the doomed continent the inelegant totems of her jealousy and rage—when Stella had fled aboard a merchant-vessel bound to safe ports, leaving behind the ghoul-consumed ravages of a second home—she had never expected to see him again.
Stella had consigned him to the swart depths of an unknown severance.
A shiver passes over her pale form. The world whirls and lists around her, steadied only by the perfect blackness he cuts against the mirrorlike water, still but for the slight way it fractures his elegant reflection against the mimic stars. She watches him turn his lamplight eyes to the fulsome moon; ears perked by the familiar, melodic edge of his Edanian dialect.
She knows she should return herself to the wild.
She knows she should allow herself the grace to be without.
But she can’t, because she is drawn to him, to the lightless trap of rocks at his abyssal cliffside. Stella slips forwards, heart rapping frantically against the lovely bones of her better judgement—run—until she can smell the piquant, once-timeless redolence of him.
“It can still hear you?” even after forsaking, stripping and remaking a man of mortal mien, he defers to a holiness she never quite got the chance to understand. Her deep, blue gaze wanders to the splay of hallowed stars; the new formations they trace, like such remote, jagged margins of new, uncharted land. Adventure and the foreboding of unknown. “These new constellations sometimes speak a tongue I do not recognize.” The stargazer’s voice is aching and frustrated.
She could ask him how he got out. But it seems too obvious, that he should persevere where others were consumed; proffered a second life, even after taking his fill of centuries. So, she simply revels in the fact that he had, fingering the electric edges of that void, of that danger that sparks in the empty, leaning space between their skin, even without his command of the shade.
“Hraefn...” her breath is caught in the enormity of her solitude and the unbearable heartache that seeks foolish antidote in his unattainable comfort.
There was no god that Hraefn prayed to, no name holy enough to roll, sanctimonious, from his parted lips. He craved no deity but the stars, and yet through the ill-crafted irony of fate, he had been rolled into shadow. For a century, he had donned it as a silken cloaked curse, a second skin that melded to his own in finite, painless stitches. He had learned to curb the tide of dusk, to billow the cinder of a sinking sun at his hooves, to pool it at his feet like a cape.
There was no god that he prayed to, and yet the sinister warmth of his milky eyes was tipped heavenwards, the husky timbre of his voice intoned with a richness that brimmed with loathing; with devotion. He expected no star to descend to him (never had they before, but for one fated night), and he held no blade to poise toward the swart of his breast, to pierce the tenderness of his skin and offer his mistress the slick of his blood.
Nothing to offer but his word; his vengeance.
And that, perhaps, was why he did not hear her approach. The rounded flutes of his ears were sculpted back toward the copse of his mussed mane, drowning in the tempestuous swell of unruly, brambly hair. The wind kissed him with a liveliness that stirred his forelock to life: an inky aura to frame the scarred, brindled countenance of his haunted visage.
Her voice was the starlight he sought, the milk and honey reverence that called to him through months passed, that beckoned him to the throes of a midnight city, the gentle click of her crescent hooves upon the ancient cobbles of Northern stone.
Hraefn smiled before he turned to her, before he lay his eyes upon the girl—the woman—that the night had crafted with an image of envy. Her voice was a melodious interlude within the dimly lit truth of his solitude, setting his ribs alight with the flame if an impassioned breath as slowly, agonizingly, he turned his sculpted jaw to look upon her splendor.
As much a scrap of silk as he remembered: a fluttering cut of a butterfly’s silver wing; an opaline gemstone, rounded into perfect, youthful beauty; a bouquet of galaxies, and frost, and all that he had come to covet.
The Shadeling could not know how starved he was for light until it came to him once more, a solitary fragment that heaved with life, her heart a flutter within her breast, the flush of pink across her lips an inviting bed for his own. His muzzle spasmed with want, his muscles itched with restraint.
Once, he had been well-coiffed in his wildness—a creature fettered by the etiquette of his highborn world.
But he had woken within a bed of grass, the dew light upon his skin, the night cold upon his brow. He was a wilder thing than once he’d been—and yet the sweetness of his voice, a deep baritone that called to her from the gap that cleaved them in two, still sang of obsequious perfection.
"The night," he began, his words a threaded web. "Can always hear. The question is if it should deign to listen,"
The night had abandoned him.
Hraefn… a prayer of her own, he dared to believe—
Stellanor had not.
His body angled toward her of its own volition, and he damned the aching within his jaw, the hunger for the suppleness of her skin, as his voice peeled free of its cage. He stepped toward her with the traitorous allure of a nightbloom blossom, begging her to return to his thrall; to bury his nose into the sweetness of her Aegean hair.
“Taaron Ka,” he had not spoken that astral name in many a moon—he had forgotten it, within the cinder of the Outlands. She whispered to him of foreign, nebulous tongues, but he cared not for the stars that lay above. “And yet your voice is just the same.”
Another step chanced forward, a muscle within his jaw feathering.
Perhaps there was a god, a woman, he might pray to.
Until she met him, and understood it only deigned to bring her into its fold when it felt her worthy; only accepted her, so as a sacrifice, so that it might better speak through its ordained. It proffered her grace when she was charting its depths like an explorer, writing its memories and epics in lines and dots of well-ordered science. Genuflected to it—as she does now—like a cosmic pretender; like a lost thing, cloaked in promised stars then set upon the earth to wonder why she couldn’t have just belonged wholly.
Why she has to be a torn-soul—a thing not here nor there, and so neither—pulled in so many different directions her seams began to split and, finally, what lays beneath is being unearthed.
Excavated. Achingly.
Carelessly.
Feebly, as she too takes another hesitant step forward—the shadowed countenance of him making her unblushing and reckless—and fingers the hard, packed sediment of her once-was. Of her, as she can never be again; pulling at it like a scab from ichorous skin, until the rawness of the wound below is left bare and glistening in the dull moonlight. A little more her, even if it hurts. A little darker, a little lighter, that much closer to containing the tethers of who she wants to be, mantled in who she has to be.
She draws closer to him because, in truth, she always wondered if that closeness, if his ministrations and his words-like-prayers-to-her, would draw her closer to the font of eventide. Would offer her stars and moonlight like such pretty things in their purest forms, plucked from his own self-contained tenebrosity. If, by giving herself to him, he could make her whole, could consign her to the dark silk of night.
Still wonders.
Still hopes.
Even in his beautifully jilted state—without the billowing ranks of umbrae—she yearns for him to complete her. Or ruin her. Usher her to a cimmerian utopia, then burn it down around her.
She nods, turning her blue eyes upwards as he speaks—knows the way it winds and unwinds, teases her with its closeness and then its distance, in turn. “Does it? Does it listen?” Her voice is hopeful and delicate because it is also terribly breakable. Yes. She knows it’s flirtations too well; as each different array of stars she finds herself beneath, a wide-eyed wayfarer, inevitably greets her mouthless and unfriendly. Holds her at arm’s length until she breaches the divide, marries herself to their sure extinction together—accepts that those she once knew are now and forever caught in bleak and funereal abeyance, shifting above the colourless skeletons of damaged worlds. Gone. Unknowable once more; her Nordlyian and Edanaian star charts but memorial portraiture.
Perhaps, she is finally sick of wedding herself to the insensate.
Though she cannot yet understand every word this night utters, she holds a sharp faith that he is the decoder. The swart salvager of both of them. And so, they coalesce. She reaches out. Past the nest of expectations and hopes they both build, out of necessity, out of more—her eyes fluttering shut where the darkness once pressed upon her skin and made the pallid territories of her throat and cheek eclipsed.
Taaron Ka, like an entreaty—like hearing her own name again after a thousand years of deprivation—“For all that has come to pass...” she supposes it is a small miracle she is not dead—dead two times over—and still here to catch him where he falls, and visa versa
‘Meree chaandanee’—it is enough to push her over the edge, the purling, biting dialect she had held within herself in hopes, she brushes her lilly-pale cheek against his own, bruise-black, and she is blissfully ensnared again.
