“what a wicked thing to do"
There was a way my soul moved once: ice, and frost, and mist. Below my skin it had felt like the shallow sea under a high-noon sun. I thought it was nothing more than a golden ghost of salt and brine shifting in me over and over, a tide reaching for the moon hour after hour. And I had loved it, that ghost of a golden sea, and the way it roiled inside me with sorrow, and loss, and melancholy.
But looking at Eik as he moves through the moonlight, with the sliver clinging to the curl of his lashes like snow, I cannot help but realize my soul doesn't feel the same anymore.
It's moving differently now.
My soul is wild, and feral, and full of love enough to drown the world. I love the way it feels below my sea-kissed skin. I leave my ship to go to him, this man that makes my soul run, and rush, and ripple like the great river. I will always go to him.
“Yes.” I paint the word across his brow. The touch burns my skin, smolders deeper than that, it makes my soul reach for the moonlight. I hope he can feel it, the way it's him and not war flaming beneath my skin and giving up snowy ash. “I asked him to stay, for Denocte and our children but he wouldn't.” The words that I'm worried we'll need him don't come as easily as they should, I feel guilty enough already.
I press into his shoulder and this time when I look back at my war-ship it seems like something softer, something made for sailing to the end of the world and beyond that. It looks like it was made for the sea between our souls. His mane still has soot and jasmine clinging to it when I pull it between my teeth. I a fold a knot into it and when I pull away it hangs on his neck like another link of the chain wrapping around my leg. A promise, that's what I call it, a promise.
“Part of me doesn't want to go.” Each word tastes like salt and fermented fruit, like bitterness, like fear. I've gone to war before, because I had too, and it felt nothing like this. This is a tear in my strange moving soul, a rot I can't hold back anymore. It's all black spaces between moonlight and starlight.
I should have gone sooner than this. I should have gone before I loved.
My lips must feel like embers against his when I breath my fears into him like air. “But if I don't go back... If I don't free all the other slaves suffering as I did...” I hope it doesn't choke him, I couldn't bare it. But I know my love surely feels like violence, like a curse, like everything sweet that kills. “There is no one else who can.” And it might not be choking him--
But--
I'm suffocating.
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