[P] love's a shrine, or else a scar

[Marisol]

THE ARCHIATER.

Oh, they are so fragile. Marisol doesn’t like to think about it, but she feels it. Every moment around Isra makes her weaker and weaker. When they are pressed together like this, when she can hear Isra’s heart beating, when she can feel the heat from the night queen’s skin—that is when she is the most delicate. It is the moment where her training all falls away in an onslaught of warmth and awful emotions, the moment her body breaks its borders with the strength of its begging, and she is powerless against that and the way her heart breaks against her chest. 

Isra smells like surrendering, and Marisol doesn’t even care. Surrender it is, then, in the face of her desire. The Commander breathes deep and in Isra’s skin there is a whole world—fresh rain and sweet dirt and all the things that Marisol’s position keeps her away from, like love and sleep. Her eyes drift closed; the world is still wonderfully silent, except for their matching pulses, and Marisol is already nostalgic for the end of the moment that she knows is coming far too soon. (Time heals all wounds, she thinks somberly, but creates most wounds, too.)

The beating of wings overhead. Marisol flinches and her eyes turn up—overhead a shadow of claws and wings flits against the black-blue of the sky, low rumbling like a thunderstorm, and she breathes in sharply. She has never met a dragon. When the old king ruled Denocte and they closed the gates with mouth-fire she had been but a child; the story had come all the way across the mountains only to go in one ear and out the other, she had never concerned herself much with the affairs of the east. It had sounded like a fable, anyway, something they said to move scrutinious eyes away from the regime.

But this has been a year of beliefs overturned, and after a breath she is hardly concerned with the scaly whip of a tail twisting overhead.

“Of course you are not alone,” says Marisol softly. Guilt builds in her chest, sharp as an arrowhead, and her dark eyes are huge and soft as she looks up at Isra and gently bumps their muzzles together. How could you think that, she wants to ask, when I went to the desert for you, when I gave up my kingdom’s respect for you? and even in her head it is a little embittered, but the Commander has always been too sharp for her own good. “If you think you are, then I have not done my job, Isra—“

She pauses sharply. What would Asterion say, if he knew? Job has always been a sacred word to her, but little is left sacred now.

“If I can help you by life or by death then I will.”

Marisol cleanly  says nothing of the fact that she has already died.

@isra <3