“and I will love you until the last breath leaves your body or mine.”
There is a moment, brief and fleeting like a dying star, in which she rejoices in the way he carries her away in kisses, in touches, and in the string of cold mountain water. Each of her bones becomes an altar for him, and each rushing pillar of blood a pyre waiting to burn. Every time he tastes away the blood and salt there is in her a heart, her soul, each singing fiber of her body a hallelujah. And in that moment she becomes, or maybe she has always been, a woman who has been a slave, a unicorn, a queen who is now looking at god.
Because what better god is there for her to praise, to bend her knee across the ore pitted earth until it is wounded, than love?
Hasn't it always been love?
Even her animal, her magic that has tooth, and claw, and hate, rejoices in the touch of all his anger (and love, and something hotter than that). When he leans against her she leans back, harder, desperately, as if she needs to use Eik to hold together all these new, strange and sharp pieces of her. And she does, she needs him, because she's too sharp and suffering for the world to hold together anymore. So she lets him hold her together even as she promises herself that tomorrow, tomorrow she'll be hard and alone and a beast of killing.
Tomorrow will come soon enough. After that, she thinks as she kisses her way slowly (painfully slowly, why does everything she do now hurt?), she can start letting that forever come swiftly and quickly upon her.
Forever, she thinks (because oh! She is thinking too much), is like the sea. Isra wants to down in it.
So she closes her eyes and lays her head against his shoulder.
And she drowns.
@
(thank you for another perfect thread)
