“You only need one man to love you. But him to love you free like a wildfire, crazy like the moon, always like tomorrow, sudden like an inhale and overcoming like the tides. Only one man and all of this.”
Always there has been this thing between us that has no real need for word, and sound, and language. Part of me knows it as love. And part of me, the part that is all endless magic and saltwater, knows it as more than just love. What lives between us, what thrives between us, is more than love. There is star-stuff, and galaxies, and religions older than moonlight, in all the tiny spaces between us.
To call the look in my eyes, the way my eyes blaze bluer than a shallow sea on a white shore, love--
It is like calling desperation hope.
Desperation is all I can feel now as I lean against him with a war-ship and a dragon behind us. It's all I can feel when I think of the battle ahead of us. It's in knowing that I'm going to breathe in fury each time I great the dawn on the deck of our ship. It's in the goodbye our hooves are whispering through the roots below, the way it might not reach the roots of our church-tree. It's in the way my heart trembles beneath my skin, and between us, at the ache in both our souls when we think of our children.
But I think of thousands of other children who wake up each day, and go to bed each night, with fear blinding them like they are living only in the center of a lightning bolt. I think of them and I do not ache as much, I do not feel like it's desperation instead of blood running through my veins.
Instead everything feels like saltwater when I think it, it feels like ichor. Somewhere the planets are sighing in the same notes as each organ beneath my rib-cage. Somewhere they are singing the song of this thing between Eik and I that is more than love.
And when he presses his cheek to my horn, to my hungry spiral of bone, and speaks of weapons---
When he does it every planet, and every star, and every god I will devour, shifts like dust above our heads. It all becomes meaningless. I wonder if he can hear the wind through my horn still. I wonder if he can still hear the song of it, the drumbeat and the lament. I wonder if he knows that I do not want to make him a weapon with that desperation called hope. I wonder if he knows how I will raze the world over and over again until every phoenix in it is dead to keep him from needing one to find his way back to the shore.
But instead, because Eik has never asked anything of me, anything, I press my cheek to his and my neck to his knot. I do not have it in me to deny him anything. I would stay if he asked it of me. “I dreamt of you before, when I lived in the world we are going to take.” Beneath my cheek my pulse flutters like a hummingbird, like I can feel all the fear I used to live by, all the desperation. “You would come to me in the moonlight and the frost. You would promise freedom.” Before the sea, before death, before this one last chain around my leg--
Before it all there had been the warrior with scars, and sorrow, and hope--
There has always been Eik.
At my hooves, the dirt pulses like a living thing. Like the magma and the loam are breathing. Everything rusted, and old, and worn down by the gods, and the sea, and time, everything turns to silver and oak. I could make nothing for him that is not made of silver and oak, moonlight and frost, freedom and wisdom. My magic begs me to pick up the halberd, to show him the way it whistles in the wind, the way it's sharp enough to cleave time apart. It begs me.
But I only stare at him and leave it on the ground, waiting. I'm always only staring at him, even when I'm sleeping, and dreaming, and telling everyone I'm going to war. I only ever see Eik, and oak, and silver.
I do not wonder if he'll notice the acorn made of sea glass on the handle. I do not wonder if he'll see it is the color of my eyes, of our daughters' eyes, of Fable's eyes. Just like I only see him I know that he only sees us. It's always been us. I kiss him with that thought in my head and nothing of war. My ship seems like a ghost behind me waiting to cross over. It seems almost trivial.
“For breaking chains.” I'm still kissing him when I say the words with his halberd glimmering like a pale star in the cage of our shadows. When I pull away it's only to press my lips to his chest, to that place where his heart beats for me and our connection greater than love. This place, this hollow notch in his chest, is one of my favorite parts of Eik.
And when I say, “this is for finding your way back to me,” I am speaking to the heart that has always found me no matter the form I take.
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