The thunder rumbles like a small audience of pleased gods. The thought of them being here makes Eik angry. Where were they when Delumine burned, and Solterra froze, and Terrastella and Denocte drowned? Lightning flashes and Eik hunches over his lover and his children like a bent and worn shield. As though he could make them invisible, too, the way he was in the eyes of the gods. It was better that way, he thought.
(Of course, his children would be anything but invisible. He just did not have the imagination to realize they themselves could be gods-- would be gods, and more.
They'll always be girls, in the eyes of a father.)
Eik knows the storm is going to get worse. It feels like something summoned by all the rage and passion and love (bitten-lipped love, bursting-fruit love, love enough to fill oceans and oceans and oceans and) and– he wants to laugh because no storm can touch them, not where it matters.
One of his daughters slips in the mud and falls, but before he can help her up she’s rising on wobbly matchstick legs, leaning against her sister who glares at the gnarled roots below them like she already has the song of war in her veins. He looks at Isra, and for a moment he can almost hear the war drums pulsing in her veins like a siren song: "to the sea, across the water. to stop is to drown." The rain drips lazily from her eyelashes, and the heavy drops almost seem to glow in the fierce blue of her eyes.
Was he ever a child? He blinks.
Well yes, of course he was.
Yes, it’s coming back now, through the dirty veil of age. Ashes coalesce into shapes, darkness folds to color: his mother’s face, his sisters, his brothers (not of blood but something deeper), even the vague outline of his father, blinding white against the dark grey backdrop of the sky. The sky was always grey in his memories.
He has to dig even deeper to remember what he was like. Untouched by life.
“When I was little I could never stop moving.” Of course, Eik did not move like the other children did. He did not often run wildly, soaking up the freedoms of childhood. Instead he moved most often at a walk, ponderous and ambling. Head low, like a man at the end of the trail and not a boy at the beginning. Even when standing he was never still but always swaying, ever so slowly, the way the massive oak trees did. Always echoing his namesake.
“I was violent.” The was flickers like a lantern bug, uncertain. (He does not mention how they were all violent in that place. In his mind it sounds like too much of an excuse.) “I didn’t understand anything, and I had as many questions as there are blades of grass.” That’s what his mother said, he remembered, in her dusty haygrass voice that felt (that was) for the longest time like home.
Home– the first of many to come, but… all of them so distant and disconnected when he’s here, with Isra, skin pressed to hers, closer than sunlight. And when he sees their children so small and wild and full of futures beyond his wildest imagination… his heart feels so full it hurts. Like it might just burst if he lingers too long at the beauty of it all.
And linger he does, half willing his heart to do just that– break, not for the first time, not for the last, into a hundred beautiful pieces. He’ll make weapons of some of the shards, and hang the rest from the church tree so that no one will ever forget–
“I would have been crazy for you, even then.” He kisses her shyly, like the first time, like a boy would, and all his past and future selves sing together like glass about to shatter.
@Isra happy to end it whenever you want <3
Time makes fools of us all
