E I K
But when we sit together, close…we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.
She smiles and the thought strikes him that his whole life led to this moment. All the paths he chose led to the church tree and the woman with eyes like an undertow. Her smile breaks him and puts hims back together in the span of a heartbeat. It’s what love does to him time and time again– shatter him into pieces, and then fit them together better than before. Smaller. More concise. And each time there is a little less darkness, a little less pith.
Keep smiling at him and maybe some day you’ll hold his heart up to the sun and the light will shine right through. Like chapel windows, or something else god speaks through.
Keep smiling, keep smiling. Keep breathing.
He smiles back at her, full of sorrow (of course) that he cannot relieve her of the pain she endures. “I know it hurts,” he says I’m sorry with a brush of his lips across her forehead, as she tucks into him and sobs; keeping some things in and pushing others out. The sound digs into him like a dagger. “you’re the strongest thing I’ve ever met.” Stronger than rain, stone, earth. Stronger than any man. Probably stronger than any dragon.
And in the space that follows, all sense of time escapes him. From the strongest woman slips one little star, and then another. He could not say how long or short the birthing was, for everything moved in slow motion and yet it happened so very quickly. What he does know is that at the sight of their children’s impossible smallness, something solid and certain forms in the shadows of his mind. This is the future that once seemed so shrouded in haze and uncertain. This here before him and beside him: Eik and Isra and Fable and their children and– he once thought he needed to know the rest of the details, the where and how and why, but he doesn’t. They don’t. They made an island of themselves, and all they have to do is defend it.
This is all that matters now.
Isra looks up at him with eyes of the bluest blue, a color that reaches into his soul and gives it a stir. “They will be everything,” The twins turn to look at the sound of their mother. They’ve heard that voice before, they’ve always heard that voice, but never like this with the rain falling on their skin and the wind tugging at them to go, go, go. Then they turn to look at their father when he says “they’re perfect.” He sounds like a man on the verge of tears, even when Isra leans into him and he kisses her and smiles.
The younger filly looks content to just lay there, feeling the earth and dirt and grass beneath her, hearing god knows what in the whispers of the wind. She watches carefully as her sister begins to rise on slender, shaky legs, and then eagerly follows suit. They’re up remarkably quickly (in this proud father’s opinion) with a little encouragement from mom and dad.
Eik watches how the rain slides down the spiral of their horns. And he feels buoyed suddenly with the hope that maybe the the struggle, the sorrow, the fear and anger, maybe it isn't all in vain. Maybe he's finally done more right than wrong. But he knows it's too early to be tallying things up-- this story is just beginning. "They're going to be trouble, aren't they?" He marvels as he watches their wide, wild eyes as they wobble toward mother's belly.
@Isra ahhh I will forever and always love writing them together <3
Time makes fools of us all
